The Photographer Who Gave a F*ck

I knew I wanted to be a photographer from my days of working and living in NYC during college, but felt so removed from that industry once I was 3,000 miles away. So I began to heavily lean on the Internet as a post-college resource, establishing connections with emerging, aspiring photographers all over the world on Flickr.

Soon after, in 2009, I started my first Internet-based photo hub, toomuchchocolate.org (TMC), as a portal to help connect the resources and work and advice of emerging photographers all over the world. Metaphorically, I described it as if every aspiring photographer (in 2009) was in a massive warehouse that was totally dark, walking around, hands outstretched, trying to blindly find their peers. TMC was an attempt to slightly illuminate the space and help photographers find each other.

The main feature/lightbulb was a weekly “Rotating Gallery” that ran for two-plus years, where a photographer from week 1 would curate and interview a photographer they loved for week 2, that person would do the same for week 3, etc. It had over 100 galleries, with curated work and interviews from photographers all over the world—a giant photo conga line that broke all the bubbles of who knew who. I also organized a film grant with Kodak, where (for an accessible $10 entry fee) photographers could apply for a grant that would provide them with hundreds of rolls of film for personal projects, judged by photo editors such as Clinton Cargill.

TMC died a quick death due to a hacker taking down the site; it coincided with my career taking off, so if anything, the timing was serendipitous. But running that site taught me the power of Internet platforms, of dissemination of work, of how to connect and reach, and how a series of building blocks can unite to form a larger whole.

It's 2018, and the midterms are coming. What's at stake, as you see it, for our country? 

My relationship to “activism”—in the sense of committing yourself to some sort of work for social good at a dedicated and sustained clip—really came about during the Kavanaugh hearings in the fall of 2018. I had seldom volunteered or worked in any sort of community engagement during high school or college, and when the Trump administration took office, I felt resigned to four years of hell, but was naive as to how bad things would get. 

In short, I watched the hearings, then went to a weekend bike race in the Sierras full of $200,000 Sprinter vans and $4,000 bikes—and nobody was talking about this massive potential change in the Supreme Court. It felt like another world, it felt wild. I felt very very pent up and honestly resentful of how cloistered most cyclists are from the issues in the U.S.

I came back to San Francisco that Sunday night and got burritos at Taqueria Cancun with a good friend named Matt Rock. By that time, I was kicking around the idea of a photo fundraiser, and he and I spoke over burritos and stale chips, under the fluorescent lights, about the site that would become FFS. There were five weeks until the midterms. I mentioned doing a fundraiser in four months, and with great intensity he looked me in the eye and said, “No, you should do it in four weeks.” And something snapped and all made sense. I spent a full week dedicated to getting the site up and organizing 12 photographers to take part in it, and I launched a week after that Taqueria Cancun dinner, in the back of a van while on a location scout in LA.

So you decided to sell prints to raise money for Democratic candidates, and you called the project FFS. Tell us about the name and the concept. How did it work? How did you pitch it to other photographers? What were your expectations for the project?

The name FFS comes from watching Kavanaugh during the hearings and thinking, For fuck’s sake. Especially in regards to McConnell really leading the way to blocking Obama’s attempt to appoint Merrick Garland in the last year of his presidency. Just watching the lying, cheating, spinning, whining, con game of the Trump administration.

Photography was my biggest voice and largest platform, I felt. I could have made calls, sent money—the usual things we are told we can do to help—but I was seeing so much “uprising" on Instagram, and felt I could help bring together members of the photo community to unite to directly take action leading up to the midterms.

Much of FFS was borrowed from what I learned running Too Much Chocolate and things I’d gleaned from Instagram after that time, in the sense of eyes and reach and getting the word out to a multitude of communities online. I got immediate “yes” responses from nearly everyone; a couple told me they wanted to stay out of politics and/or keep their feed clean.

The original idea was to split proceeds up to five ways, directing money to up to five different nonprofits. But after much deliberation, vetting, and trying to take into account the collective wishes of all 12 photographers, we decided to evenly split proceeds between Emily’s List (which works to get more women into elected office) and Swing Left (which aimed and succeeded to flip the House in the midterms).

My expectations were to raise maybe $5,000-8,000. I think it’s hard to have expectations. I prefer to try to set up the structure and support it as best I can and see where it heads. We did four weeks of print sales, with prints changing weekly from each of the 12 photographers; that way it incentivized people to purchase prints early and often, and kept the whole site looking fresh, with eyes on it. It also gave us a reason to reach out and promote it constantly.

 What was it like running FFS?

Well, I was doing ALL of this while also being a working photographer, and I was super busy that October. I took several afternoon and evening breaks during a weekend wedding to set it up (sorry, Chris and Cristina!) and ran it all off my laptop, often out of hotels while the site was up. I did a job in Switzerland and Germany during the halfway point of FFS, and had no way of pre-programming the switch from week 2 to 3, so I set an alarm in the middle of the night to wake up and toggle everything to the next week.

The biggest hurdle was trying to get 12 photographers to stay on deadline and read directions for formatting the work. I did a lot of herding and checking in and resizing incorrectly formatted work. I absolutely knew I could not and did not want to handle print fulfillment, so I worked with my longtime portfolio printer, El-Co Color in New Jersey, which received TIFFs of all the files, and handled printing and shipping. In short, it was like a five-week setup-to-breakdown e-commerce site.

What were the highlights/high points of doing FFS?

The biggest high point was raising $20,000 and donating $10,000 to Emily’s List and $10,000 to Swing Left. Just putting in this work, and putting full, 100% effort into “FFS 1.0,” then seeing so many more women get elected into office and the U.S. House of Representatives flipped, was quite gratifying. I totally know $10,000 per organization was a drop in the bucket, and the Koch brothers and lobbying groups are dropping millions on the other side, but if everyone were apathetic and thought their effort made no difference, we’d be in an even worse spot.