Dan Monick

That's So New York - In addition to my most recent hobby which involves me sitting and flicking through pages and pages of online-stores, images, portfolio’s, collections and designer profiles in an attempt to find the next big thing, I have recently come to notice that yet another hobby seems to have begun toppling in; that of which still involves me flicking through pages and pages of images/portfolio’s; in this case, perhaps online-stores too. “What on earth is this hobby?” you may ask; my answer? Photography … well, photographers. I have a growing obsession with photographers and spending my days flicking through images, acting all artsy as I attempt to sit and ponder “what is the concept behind this photograph?” you know, like them art-professionals do when you head into a gallery and they’re sat on the benches; then you walk back past that same bench 3 hours later and they’re still sat there? Yeah, you know the ones.

The reason for my brief mention of online-stores when introducing the photographer-related hobby is simply due to the fact that the photographer I would like to focus on also retails a selection of graphic tee’s via Blood Is The New Black; that photographers name? Dan Monick. Flicking back a sentence or two, for those of you who have not managed to stumble across Blood Is The New Blackprior to this post, let me briefly outline the concept behind the store. Blood Is The New Black was founded by Designer/Line Curator, Mitra Khayyam and made its launch back in 2004. Mitra’s aim was to “Display the works of emerging artists, designers and photographers in order to propel their careers and support the underground art movement, through design collaborations”,“Introduce fans of both fashion and the arts to new designers, photographers and illustrators, to whom otherwise consumers may have not been exposed” and lastly, “Create a line that is wearable, comfortable and stylish, yet has an opinion”. Did she succeed? I believe so (plus, I would strongly recommend that you have a flick through the store, as there is a handful of talented artists, photographers and illustrators who have a number of investable pieces on offer).

Back to Dan Monick. I think that Monick’s client list alone says a lot about him as a photographer and his talents; I mean, when you have the New York Times, Paper Magazine, People, Rolling Stone, PACSUN, Virgin Mobile, Nikon, Virgin Records and LA Weekly under your belt and have labelled them as clients, as a photographer you’ve pretty much made it, right? - I was going to try and stop myself from posting Monick's artist profile images which I came across whilst flicking through BITNB, yet I'm afraid that he had a panda mask and although these images were simply photographed as an introduction to the artist/photographer, I have to say that I would gladly strut around with these said images printed across a graphic-tee or two ...

(Image Credit: Blood Is The New Black, Artists, Dan Monick)

If anyone is feeling generous and would like to grab me one of them panda masks, please feel free to do so (wink face). Despite the fact that these images are delightful, I feel that I should most probably throw in a handful of images from Monick's official portfolio; here I go ... (CONTINUE READING)