David Brandon Geeting

David Brandon Geeting on Saying “I Love You”, Making New Art with No Research, Etsy, and more.

January 10, 2023

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David Brandon Geeting (aka DBG) is a New York City-based photographer and artist known for his playful still life images and more recently, his portraits. I love the way he has fun with light & color on photos like this one of Jason Stewart or how he blends still life & portraiture with these pics of Oneohtrix Point Never. David photographed Bernie Sanders for TIME Magazine back in 2019. He’s published four photos books in his career so far and he’s working on a brand new one, titled The Marble, since 2020. Lucky for us, David is here to tell us what he’s been into.

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100mm Lens

Sometimes I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at in peoples’ photos cuz the shit is so far away. We wanna see those juicy details!! The first time I put a long lens on my camera I realized you don’t have to do very much or go very far to make the world look interesting. It’s like when you do shrooms and every little detail in your field of vision is its own universe. The 100mm is the perfect tool to explore those little universes. I know, I know, you could just use a 35mm lens and move closer to what you’re photographing. But it doesn’t look the same – the 100mm flattens space in a way that makes life look weird as hell. Believe me, that .5x button on the iPhone camera is burned into my muscle memory too, but next time, try reaching for the 2x – it’s a whole new world over there.

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Saying “I Love You”

I tell my wife I love her like 5 times a day. It feels so good to say! And every time my friends say they love me, I feel so honored, I’m like “damn… me???” You can really make someone’s day when you say it. Showing love often gets spun in the opposite way, but let’s be real for a second – HIDING the love is some wussy shit. And life’s too short for that!

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Sleeping til you Wake Up

If you’re anything like me, your body feels completely separate from your mind, which feels completely separate from your heart, and most of your internal dialogue is you getting mad at yourself for doing some shit that another part of you disapproves of. Every part of us matters, but if we’re often neglecting one of these guys it’s definitely the vessel that houses this mess to begin with. Your body needs sleep bro! You’d be surprised at how many of these voices start to quiet when you actually let your body do its thing once in a while and decide when it wants to wake up. And you can’t feel an ounce of guilt for not setting an alarm, otherwise this whole experiment is negated. If you really wanna wake up early, then go to bed early (I’m leaving this piece of advice in writing so I can finally learn it myself).

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Etsy

I feel like Etsy has confusing marketing that keeps cool people from using it, but I’m here to set the record straight – I get all my shit from Etsy! In the past year I have purchased an 80’s laminate kitchen table, a taxidermied praying mantis, vintage 501’s, custom wooden storage boxes, a rock with actual moss on it, 60’s drink coasters, a scorpion sculpture made out of silverware, a Bugs Bunny comic from the 60’s, a David Hockney exhibition poster from the early 90’s, a hanging pendant light, the coveted Nirvana “Incesticide” t-shirt, and a glass blown pipe with a frog jumping on it. One time I had leftover Balenciaga sneakers from a shoot and tried to sell them on Grailed – some anon messaged me calling them fakes and typed word-for-word “People like you should go to hell!” Thankfully for us, this amount of testosterone is actually illegal on Etsy, so we can all continue to bliss out and browse easy :-)

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Embracing Winter (if you have the means to!)

Most of the time, when I’m mad about something, I’ll think back on it months later and be like “wait why did I even care about that?” We should collectively all try that with Winter. The air smells so fucking good. Like where is that mystery campfire coming from?? I feel like every time I step outside and take a breath, I level up. I get that you think you don’t like the cold. It took me a while to understand that “acquired taste” means a taste that I can STILL acquire. Now when I don’t like food, I just eat it until I do. This January, when your unadjustable New York apartment heat is cranked so high that you can smell the lead paint melting off the walls, take a step outside onto your stoop for a breath of that crispy ass chimney-scented air, and remember DBG sent you there.

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Making New Art with No Research

Research is the number one deterrent when it comes to making art, because it’s the fastest way to see if what you want to make “has been done before” (that’s in air-quotes because we all know deep down that NOTHING has been done the same way that we’re doing it). Imagine the art that would flow out of you without any sort of “but what will THEY think of it” hang-ups. That’s really what we all want to see, right? We want to see the most surprising, most vulnerable, most specific-to-your-mind-right-now type shit. The more you care about that one person that kinda did something sorta like it one time, the less you’re gonna make anything. You can always research after the fact, if you’re really hung up on it… but at least you will have made something! Making things feels amazing.

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David Brandon Geeting

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