I’m heading up to NYC for a quick visit tomorrow (Fri. the 20th). I’ll have my books on me in case any of you purchasers of art out there were interested in seeing my Polling Places Project et al.

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I’m still editing all the images from the trip, but I finally got my film back last Friday. As a teaser, I posted a few low-resolution images to my archive, which is accessible through the slide show below. (Larger, hi-resolution scans are available if anyone needs them.)

Hope you enjoy.

Spain & Portugal – Images by Ryan Donnell

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As testament to the power of the tweet, here’s a snapshot from the site’s Google Analytics page:

Wow.

And please check out some of the new images that I made on Tuesday during the primary elections here in Philly. (The Mummer’s Museum! You have to be kidding me!)

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It was fun and I want to thanks photo editor Zoey Sless-Kitain and Monsieur McCormick for the chance to make the images and the great play in the magazine. Also, big shout out to all the portrait subjects for their patience and willingness to share and to play along, from being hoisted onto forklifts and splashing beer around behind the bar. Thanks.

Check out some outtakes at my archive or via the slideshow below:

Philadelphia Beer Scene – Images by Ryan Donnell

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Just a quick note that the Selected and Chosen winners of this year’s American Photo 26 annual have been posted. I’m honored to be included for the 2nd year in a row. You can see my image from the Louvre in Paris in the Chosen gallery:  http://www.ai-ap.com/cfe/APss/

If you’d like to see more images from Paris, check out the slideshow below or the gallery in my archive.

April in Paris – Images by Ryan Donnell

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Ireland’s Forgotten Sons Recovered Two Centuries Later by Abigail Tucker

I know it’s the day after St. Patrick’s Day, but this was a fascinating story about the trials and tribulations of some of the 19th-century Irish laborers who helped build the rail infrastructure of our country. These guys  (and it was all guys) doing the digging are all volunteers and amateur archeologists. It’s a great story, full of evil, powerful men and innocent workers trying to prosper in a foreign land when circumstances forced them out of their own country. Thanks to the passionate guys who let me hang out and document their efforts. Creepiest thing that I took away from the day: all these men are buried a stone’s throw from a neighborhood of McMansions. Poltergeist anyone?

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(For the geeks out there, it’s a 12″ x 12″ Chinle Ice portfolio by Moab and Case Envy. The prints were printed on an Epson 3880 on pre-drilled Moab Lasal Matte paper.)

Here’s a little sneak peek:

Thanks to Robert West, of Walker Lundee fame, for the music. Have a great weekend.

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The March issue of Philadelphia Magazine marks the end of a small epoch for me. Since November of 2005, I’ve been given the honor of making the opening photograph of the calendar section in Philadelphia Magazine. I haven’t made every single one of these images during that time period, but I did complete a lot of them. To give you an idea, I’ve cobbled together 32 images of images that ran as the Pulse opener from my archive, which represents 32 issues of the magazine. This doesn’t mean the section is leaving the magazine, just that I won’t be shooting as many of the images for that section, if at all.

The assignments took on different formats through the 4 years that I did it. When I first began making the images, we were approaching the assignments from a journalistic approach, trying to find newsworthy events for the upcoming month’s issue that we could photograph in a candid, documentary approach.

What made the assignment particularly challenging at that time was making a singular photograph that communicated the story, but also fit the VERY specific format of the page, e.g., the format had to be slightly more vertical than square and with a lot of negative space in the composition to run type in two very specific places. Suffice it to say, I would often find a composition and just sit (sometimes for hours) waiting for that story-telling moment to take place within my little viewfinder. If I missed it, well, I didn’t miss it. It was a challenge and a lot of fun.

Eventually, the magazine decided to start running portraits of newsworthy Philadelphians in the Pulse spot. It offered me a chance to meet some fascinating people in and around Philadelphia. It also afforded me a chance to test my lighting chops. We, my assistants and I, almost always took our little studio on-location to where the subjects lived. The challenge was to create a fairly consistent portrait on the road. The set-up was almost never the same.

As I looked through the images, particularly the older images, I was struck by how many things I had experienced and people that I had met along the way: South Philly men dressed as Brazilian Mardi Gras dancers, Sixers dancers, Rocky in the Italian Market, homicides in the Southwest, rowing on the Schuykill, hanging out of the 56th floor of a skyscraper to photograph a crane operator, Eastern State’s gargoyles, Larry & Alicia, behind-the-scenes of a mall Santa, riding the Zamboni at the Flyers, flower show contestants, monkeys brushing their teeth, crawling around an abandoned roller-coaster from the ’60s, wudder ice, the Wildwood tram, high school rivalries, Comcast’s video wall, a congressional hopeful, an R&B legend, a surfing prodigy, an artists’ granddaughter, and so much more.

What other job in the world gives you access to that? Damn, I love this job sometimes.

Thanks to all the Philly Mag staff and alumni, the subjects and as always my assistants that helped make these images possible.

So, as a little homage to the good times that I had making those photos, I’ve put together a little video slideshow:

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