Photo of the Day: D and P

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the Pacific Northwest was the center of bootblacking. There were multiple international titleholders, national winners, and a deep bench of regional expertise. For a while, I had a standing policy that I didn’t let anyone less than a national champion touch my leather, and I was not really restricting who would work on my shoes, pants, shirts and jackets.

In the fall of 2014, I did a poster for SML’s “Boots and Buzzcuts,” an event that’s now on hiatus. I’m pretty disappointed by the poster when I look at it now; the concept would have been better served by two separate posters, rather than trying to shoehorn two images onto one sheet of paper. My memory is that there was a reason for this, and I was effectively over-ruled. However, there were two great photoshoots as part of it: one not (yet) in the photo of the day series, and then this one.

Are those DM’s shoes or mine?

I think this is the only shoot I did with D; there was at least one other shoot with P. This is not the image that was used in the poster: D is throwing a fair amount of shade here, and that was not the image I was trying to construct for the event. The poster uses one about fifteen frames earlier where D is actually smiling.