Former Photographer & Journalist
Last September, I took a trip to West Texas, sidetracked to Carlsbad, New Mexico, and on the way home made a roadside stop at the West of the Pecos Museum in Pecos, Texas. It was a strange and interesting place. On the trip, though, I took my Nikon F100 and a few rolls of cheap film, which I cheaply had processed and put on disc at a drug store. The result was some flat, muddy, grainy image files, that seemed to represent the overall tone of the town of Pecos.
On this blog, I will continue to use Mondays to post images related to music. As many of the musicians I have photographed are friends from West Virginia, I also have their music to share. Here’s a shot of my friends’ band Down Goes Frazier, who were based in Huntington in the mid-00s. If you’re a fan of the likes of Hot Water Music, Against Me or Planes Mistaken for Stars, have a listen (or download for free) their first two EPs below. Nowadays, members of DGF who aren’t a college professor are playing in the bands Rat Ship and Station(s).
This is my good friend Brian — a fantastic photographer and even better individual. He died of cancer on May 2, 2013. I did not know I had this image until I came across it cleaning off a hard drive just now. As soon as I saw it, I had to post it on here despite it being past five o’clock on a Friday evening. Looking at the contact sheet, I took this photo as a lighting test in the studio. Brian and I were in our first semester of graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin. It’s the only frame I shot of him. It was a difficult image to edit just now, so I barely did, and it brought tears to my eyes looking at it. I miss him.
On Wednesday I referenced the Instagram hashtag theme of “Woman Crush Wednesday.” So today I go with the “Throwback Thursday” theme. I’m embarrassed to admit that I did a terrible job archiving my image files before 2006. Most were saved as small JPEGs on discs. This photograph — along with the image I posted last week — is one of the very few that remain from my stint in Charleston in 2004. The photo was from an assignment I did on the city’s Night Out Against Violence, which took place in a downtown housing project. When I saw this boy watching from the other side of a fence, I found it unfortunately ironic that he was holding a plastic gun and also blowing a party horn. That summer I had reported on half a dozen murders in the city, so that moment has always stuck with me.
Photograph by Darin Johnson
The image above was not taken by me, but is of me — singing in the hardcore punk band Old Poets. Around 2011-2012, my friends Desmond, Jess, Tim and I tapped into our angst-fueled youth, wrote songs, and played a few shows around Austin. The band was short-lived but we had fun. Now all that we have to show for it is some photographs and a half-assed demo recording, which you can listen to below. Though I’ll be using this new website to primarily share my photographs, from time to time I will post music, videos or other content I find relevant.
From April 2011 until early 2012, my friend Zach and I produced a portrait project in Austin called Femme et vélo. The concept was simple — photographs of women on bicycles (with some vintage styling thrown in). It gave Zach and me the opportunity to be creative, but having to force the bike into all the images we published was limiting. So here’s one the last frames I captured on our shoot with model Cecilia — one without a bike. Click here for photographs with bikes.
In 2004 I was a reporter for the Charleston Daily Mail in the capital city of West Virginia. When needed, I was asked to be the photographer for other reporters’ stories. For one story, I was asked to go with a reporter to the Mount Olive maximum security prison to interview Dana December Smith. Thirteen years earlier, Smith had been sentenced to two life sentences for murdering a mother and her daughter. The story was about how Smith had discovered evidence proving his innocence, and I simply photographed him in a room in the prison explaining this to the reporter. Based on a web search, Smith is still in prison today, and still maintains his innocence.
(Pardon the quality of the image, which was taken on a Nikon D1 and poorly preserved as a JPEG over the last 10 years.)
Monday was Memorial Day (formerly known as Decoration Day), so I thought I’d share this image I took of the Cooper family decorating their mother’s grave near Bradshaw, West Virginia, in southern McDowell County. I spent months documenting the Coopers and another family in War, West Virginia, in 2007 as part of my graduate thesis project.
This photograph is from a session I did with hip-hop duo Rabble Rousers (aka B-Rude and Meuwl) in October 2008. Samuel “Meuwl” Harshbarger (right) was one of my favorite people to photograph. He was smart, funny, charismatic, immensely talented and it was easy to make good images with him. I worked with Sam a number of times between 2006 and his untimely death in 2009. This is hardly one of my favorite images of either of these gentleman, but I share it because I eventually used it as the cover image of the Rabble Rouser’s 2009 record “Tastes Like Crazy,” which you can stream or download for free below. For more images from this shoot, check out the music portraits section, where there will be even more Meuwl and B-Rude photos to come.
My first visit to Big Bend National Park was in 2006 for a few days of backpacking with my friend and fellow photographer Marc Hamel. This is one of the only photographs I can seem to find from that trip, for which I have very fond memories.