Matthew Crabtree, a Lost Angeles-based certified fraud investigator, poses for portraits near Denver, Colo.  He turned out to be about the most accommodating subject I could ask for, indulging me for a series of photographs while he vacationed at his parents’ home outside Denver, Colo.  

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Picked up a fun last-minute assignment on Friday for The Wall Street Journal.  The gig put me on a break-neck schedule of back-to-back shoots that finally ended on Sunday at midnight with a second round of Lucha Libre.  I was going to try to make the Rocky Mountain Fur Con’s closing dance late last night after lucha but found myself in such exhausted shape that it was time to go home and wind down what turned out to be an incredibly productive weekend.

This particular shoot presented the challenge of having to make portraits of a subject with very little story information and and even smaller timeframe. Slated as something that was supposed to have a bit of an X-Files feel to it, Crabtree (and the focus of the article) turned out to be a little less conspiracy-esque than originally described.  Thankfully, the first photographs that I shot matched that tone a bit better (and can be viewed along with the article, here).  

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Earlier this week I had the opportunity to photograph Ellen Bruss, the head of a Denver-based marketing and design firm, in her home that she shares with her husband, Mark Falcone.  Their 6,000 square-foot townhome is one of Denver’s unique gems, only 20 feet wide and set back on a lot butting up to the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art.  The building was designed by British architect David Adjaye, a project completed in tandem with the neighboring museum, also of his design.  The materials and aesthetic of the two buildings have a lot of crossover, though the home is particularly striking in the long, horizontal sweep of its interior.  Narrow hallways with untrimmed doorways set back into the wall create strong, unbroken lines from the front of the house all the way to the back.

Architecture is something that has always interested me, something that speaks to the priorities of any particular society.  Form often gives way to function, especially in American culture where the development industry turns on a 20-year construction cycle, tearing down older buildings to make way for modern filler.  I’ve always felt that if the building is not intended to be permanent, design suffers.  

So it was especially pleasant to photograph in the Adjaye house, a building that represents the best of both form and function, a piece of art in its own right and a nice little landmark in my favorite city.

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