Larry Sultan is a master of composition.

His photographs have had a huge influence on my own work and continue to inspire and push me to this day.

He will be missed.

Dennis Hopper recently exhibited some of his photographs and paintings at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City.

I'll be honest: I've always liked Hopper. He has an impeccable eye for art in various forms -- films, painting, photography, art collecting, acting, etc. Some of the films I saw him in when I was younger -- Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, and Blue Velvet -- certainly gave him some good cred in my book.

So getting the chance to look at some of his photographs was especially intriguing to me. One, because I'm a photographer. Two, because all of the photos in the exhibit were from the early to late 1960s, a time period when he was an up and coming actor and artist and before his breakthrough directorial debut with Easy Rider.

This first batch is especially interesting in that he made the photographs in the '60s and revisited them in 2009 to paint his immense "billboard paintings." He has a photorealism thing going on mixed with a bit of Ed Ruscha's influence (whom himself is a subject of one of Hopper's photograph/billboard painting combos below).

I think it's kind of amusing that these photo/painting combinations are of visual artists. Some of the greatest ones, in fact. Hopper was definitely hanging around the right crowd in '60s art world. No doubt his growing stature in Hollywood at the time offered him some choice access to the stars of art and entertainment of the time.

Ultimately, the world doesn't need more images of celebrities. However, these images capture a time before celebrity saturated our lives.

Through Hopper's eyes we see the personalities before/beyond publicists and movie plugs and more like our confidants and friends. They were just that to Hopper and, for a fraction of a second, they're ours, too.

I always want to make photos — whether it’s for an ad campaign, a magazine assignment, corporate portraits, or personal work.

Sometimes just finding a friend, a cool location, and some beautiful light does the trick.

© Armando Bellmas

© Armando Bellmas

© Armando Bellmas

This is what happens when you go camping, have a few cocktails and such around the campfire, and after everyone else has gone to sleep.

© Armando Bellmas

© Armando Bellmas

Yep, that’s me in the bottom photo. Killer calves, huh?

Joanne, Betsy & Olivia, Bayside, New York (1998) © Catherine Opie

From a feature on Catherine Opie in Art in America magazine’s December 2008 issue:

[For her] “Domestic” series (1995-98), [Catherine Opie] traveled the country photographing lesbian couples and families in their homes — her own version of the great American road trip embarked on by such photographers as Stephen Shore or Robert Frank.

[There's] the intimate, unkempt interior shown in Joanne, Betsy & Olivia, Bayside, New York (1998) (above). On the table are the remains of breakfast — coffee cups and half-eaten bagels — and toys litter the floor in the home, where two white women live with their adopted Asian daughter. Opie describes this work as a “conversation” with Tina Barney, whose photographs portraying conventional, wealthy families (below) were being widely exhibited at the time. But of course it was more an argument than a conversation, a challenge to the idea that a family must be defined within a heterosexual framework.

The Daughters #246 (2002) © Tina Barney