“Instagram Killed the Blog”: Patrick O’Dell on Documenting 2000s New York

 

In Patrick O’Dell’s heyday, debauchery went undocumented. During the early aughts, before we were all privy to others’ lowest moments on Instagram, the former downtown skater boy started a blog called Epicly Later’d archiving the the exploits of him and his irreverent New York friends, Chloë Sevigny, Dash Snow, and Kembra Pfahler included. The red-eyed point-and-shoot shots of wasted kids were a rebellion against the era’s insistence on fine-art photography, he says: “I’m going to be one of these shitty photographers as an aesthetic choice.” But eventually, the blog caught on and spun off into a VICE show. And now, Y2K nostalgia has helped turn the project into a photobook. Inspired by scrappy collectibles of yore, O’Dell sifted through over 100,000 snaps to piece together Epicly Later’d (the book), released last month. To celebrate, O’Dell called us up to talk about the Thrasher era, embracing happy accidents, and leaving a digital footprint.

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JULIAN RIBEIRO: Thank you for taking the time, I really appreciate it.

PATRICK O’DELL: You guys have the upper hand with me because I’m an Interview magazine fan. I’m like, “Got to get this one done.”

RIBEIRO: Well, I am a fan of you. I’m 25, and I feel like I grew up on Epicly Later’d video stuff.

O’DELL: So you didn’t look at the blog, you’re too young. I showed the book to somebody your age, and I don’t think they knew who anyone was and I was just getting mortified looking over his shoulder like, “Wow, this sucks if you don’t know who Ben Cho is.”

RIBEIRO: Well, I’m going through the book seeing photos of Dash Snow and above me right now in my room is a big framed Dash Snow piece. So it’s not very far away. Maybe for a reader who isn’t as familiar with your work, can we talk about that?

O’DELL: Yeah. So I went to art school and then worked at Thrasher and I lived in New York. When I was in art school, we would shoot a bunch of photos and then display them on the wall with thumbtacks and that’s probably about the most that anyone would ever see them. It sounds old, but times were different and there wasn’t social media. I think there was Friendster at that point, and then MySpace, but those weren’t really places to exhibit photography. The book talks about Amy Kellner’s blog and I’ll admit, I just was like, “I want to make a carbon copy of your blog.” But I worked for Thrasher shooting skate photos and tour, and I think the part of Thrasher that I liked the best was storytelling and being a lens for the audience. Because that was what I liked in skateboard magazines, reading the tour articles about these adventures that I wasn’t able to go on because I was in high school or whatever. So on my blog I was trying to do the same thing where you can feel the adventure we were going on every night. It would be the taxi going to the thing and then coming home and then what we did tonight and maybe some hangover photos the next day at Tompkins.

RIBEIRO: Totally. The style has been aped so much since. Kids still do that, but they do it on Instagram.

O’DELL: Instagram killed the blog for me. Once I got Instagram, I pretty much stopped updating it. I was like, “I’ll just do this instead.”

RIBEIRO: Yeah.

O’DELL: Then we were figuring out a cutoff, because the blog drifted off as I got older. I don’t know if I grew out of it or what, but I’m not the same person that I was in those photos. So, we cut it off when I started shooting more film. There’s no film [on the blog] and there’s no iPhone in the book.

RIBEIRO: The point and shoot digi photo brings me to a time that maybe I wasn’t there for. I think we just associate that look so much with the 2000s and early 2010s vibe.

O’DELL: Yeah, the flash was right next to the lens so there was tons of red eye and glare. But your iPhone doesn’t shoot that same kind of photo at night because the flash isn’t the same.

RIBEIRO: Now that we’re 10-plus years deep into the Instagram era, where basically everything you see is taken on a phone camera, it can sometimes feel like those are the images that make the most sense to people. If someone takes a photo with an incredibly nice camera of Tompkins Square Park, I’m going to be like, “Dude, I don’t want to look at that.”

O’DELL: Yeah. I always felt like I would do things that were a little reactionary, because when I went to art school, it was all about shooting beautiful photos. We would look at these classic photographers and I was more interested in album covers and photographers who aren’t photographers, like Nan Goldin, where maybe it can be out of focus or blurry a little bit, maybe the colors don’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to shoot like Ansel Adams. I’m naming really obvious photographers but—

RIBEIRO: No, I get it. Maybe the emotion and the vibe are going to supersede technical elements.

O’DELL: Yeah. I’m like, “I’m not Richard Avedon, I’m going to shoot more snapshot,” because that was me rebelling against fine art photography. I was like, “I’m going to be one of these shitty photographers as an aesthetic choice,” but I guess now the aesthetic choice would be proving that I can actually take good photos. So maybe I’ll just make another book someday with the nicer photos, because I was eliminating any film. There’s a little bit of SLR photos in there. I cheated a couple times, but I mostly tried to stick to pictures that were on the blog already.

RIBEIRO: I know kids who carry around an old iPhone to take photos on because the new ones are too crisp. There’s a deep nostalgia for those images, which is so funny to think about.

O’DELL: I’m using a Contax film 35-millimeter camera now, and I took it on this boat trip down the Mississippi River and it got waterlogged a little bit. So on the edges, in the vignette, it’s really a halo. Part of me needs to go buy a new lens and fix my camera, but the other part of me is like, “Oh, this is nice.”

RIBEIRO: It’s a happy accident. Do you ever see aesthetic similarities like, “That looks like a photo that me or someone I know might’ve taken 15 years ago”?

O’DELL: I had this experience where a good photographer that does commercial work told me that the moodboard for the photography job had a bunch of Epicly Later’d photos. And I was like, “You know they could hire me, I would make it look like Epicly Later’d.”

RIBEIRO: It feels very topical in that sense. 

O’DELL: Yeah, but sometimes I never know. I was wearing these skate shoes. They were these Nike Ishod Wairs and my wife was like, “Oh, those are cool,” because they’re retro and puffy, they look like DCs. But I just was thinking of them like that’s what I wear. It’s funny when you get to an age where you’re on trend sometimes just because you’re old and don’t change the way you dress. 

RIBEIRO: 100 percent. 

O’DELL: I just can’t change. What kind of shirt are you wearing?

RIBEIRO: Dude, I was going to say we’re wearing the same shirt. This is just a random Supreme shirt. Wait, I’m going to take a screenshot for myself because it’s so funny. 

O’DELL: Yeah, it might be the same one.

RIBEIRO: I think it’s the same. Come on, right?

O’DELL: Wow.

RIBEIRO: Going back to the book, do you have an idea of how many photos you had to move through to get to the final cut? 

O’DELL: I don’t have a number, but I would say maybe 100,000.

RIBEIRO: I figured you’d say something like that.

O’DELL: Every night I would go downstairs and start hitting the arrow button going through pictures and it wasn’t a good feeling a lot of the time, because it was like a time machine. And since it was perfectly in order, I was seeing romantic relationships and then seeing them go bad. I was seeing bad things I did like, “Man, I shouldn’t have done that.” I was seeing people who had died. And just reliving my life from 20 years ago, but sped up, I would come back upstairs like, “Oh my god.” I wasn’t expecting that, because I don’t think I had ever gone through the pictures like that. I might have fished around for pictures but I never went through them all in order.

RIBEIRO: Yeah. And as I went through, I noticed faces of people that I still see around or know. I was going through it this morning and I saw the photo of Jimmy from Trash and Vaudeville. When I was a little kid, Jimmy was so cool to me. I wondered what the feeling must have been like to go through so many changes.

O’DELL: Well, I’m married now and have a 4-year-old. I had to schedule my interview around preschool. I don’t think about the stuff I used to think about. I’ve just completely changed. And being in a weird sleep deprivation chamber watching your life unfold, it did feel like Charles Dickens or something. 

RIBEIRO: And now our whole lives are documented either by parents or by kids themselves. I can go look at my Facebook post from when I was nine years old like, “School today sucked.” It’s not necessarily a perk to always know everything I ever did.

O’DELL: Yeah. Not often, but there were a couple things I had to clean up over time.

RIBEIRO: Has anyone got on you about any photos in the book? 

O’DELL: Yeah, a little. There was one person who was not happy. I sent a picture to this one guy and he said, “Don’t put me in your book.” He was nice about it but I was still like, “Dude, what?” All the photos exist on the site.

RIBEIRO: For, what, 15 years at this point?

O’DELL: Yeah. Some of the pictures aren’t the best. There’s a photo of Chloë [Sevigny] and I remember at the time going like, “Oh, this is bad,” because she was a little wasted. But it’s in the book and then she posted the photo on Instagram and now I look at it and I’m like, “She looks great.” But Alan Levitt just made a book and he put a picture of me in it, and he was really worried that I would be mad. But I’m like, “I don’t care, it’s a picture from 20 years ago.”

RIBEIRO: When you were uploading to the blog on a regular basis and hitting high view counts, was there ever an idea in your mind that these images would live long enough to see a book?

O’DELL: Well, I did think about it. When I did my contract with VICE, I hired an entertainment lawyer to use the name for my show. The show and the blog are not connected, at least for me. I think the name’s stupid, but VICE was like, “Would you call your show Epicly Later’d?” And it was a known thing. So I had an entertainment lawyer do my contract, and the reason I mention this is because, when we were naming the book Epicly Later’d, I was like, “Am I allowed to call my book Epicly Later’d?” Because I think, if I tried to do a Netflix show called Epicly Later’d, I think VICE could say no. But I had excluded apparel and books in my contract. I couldn’t believe it. 

RIBEIRO: And VICE is in completely new hands now, no?

O’DELL: Yeah.

RIBEIRO: I feel like they’ve had such an interesting journey. The old VICE magazines are a great reference point for the kids. I keep thinking about this photo in the book of the iTunes screen and it has the songs and it’s like, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, The Cure.

O’DELL: I think it’s interesting because certain things were lame at the time like going to Smith’s Night and DJing with a computer. And same with VICE. In the context of all these other fashion magazines, VICE was lame. It was shitty in a way. Working at VICE wasn’t going to get me into a fashion show. But then time rolls on and people suddenly are nostalgic for it.

RIBEIRO: It feels like we’ve lost the recipe because all that VICE content where they’re like, “We took three white guys to Mexico to do DMT and write graffiti.” No one is on that anymore, but there’s an appetite for it.

O’DELL: It was so stupid sometimes, but it was also fun. I work for VICE again now. I had a weird moment where I wrote on Instagram, “I have a book and I have a show on VICE,” and it’s like, “Wow, I’m weirdly relevant again.” I don’t sound conceited or something, but for a while I was feeling a little bit like a loser. But now we have a show coming out that’s on VICE and a book.

RIBEIRO: How has the reception been to the book?

O’DELL: I decided I wasn’t going to research it too much. I wasn’t going to Google myself, but my friends like it. If you get enough texts from your friends, you’re like, “All right.” Jerry Hsu and Ryan McGinley and Chloë Sevigny liked it, so I’m good. And I like that the price is not that expensive and it’s not very limited.

RIBEIRO: Yeah, that’s good.

O’DELL: I don’t know whether that sounds lame, but I was picturing some of the photo books I bought in high school in Columbus, Ohio and treasured, and none of them were limited. That’s what I was going for. 

RIBEIRO: You’re from Columbus?

O’DELL: Yeah.

RIBEIRO: I was just over there. My boyfriend’s from there.

O’DELL: I was just there too. I wanted to tell you about what I was thinking with Interview magazine. You remember Glenn O’Brien?

RIBEIRO: Yes.

O’DELL: I photographed him for another magazine and I was just so starstruck. He was the editor for how many years? I don’t know. A lot of his work predated me, like his public access show where he would have Madonna or Basquiat on. But just as an icon, I was so enamored with him he was such a nice guy that I saw him as an idol like, “Wow, this is who I want to be like.” And when you guys hit me up about this, it made me really think about Glenn O’Brien and the one day we had together.

RIBEIRO: That rocks. There’s many people in that book who are in the Interview universe, like Chloë or Kembra [Pfahler]. Is there one photo for you that’s like, the book is on fire and I get to save one photo.

O’DELL: Maybe Ben Cho giving Jerry Hsu a tattoo. And it looks like they’re doing drugs, but they’re not. I was worried that somebody would assume they were shooting heroin, but he was doing stick poke tattoos. I have a couple of those.

RIBEIRO: The image of your arm is in the book too, right?

O’DELL: Yeah. And he gave me another one. But my arm’s too hairy for good pictures. It’s special to me because we kind of all got the same tattoos. Oh, and the one where the sun’s coming up and it’s 6:00 in the morning.

RIBEIRO: Oh, the afters.

O’DELL: And the cover photo too. We spent a lot of time thinking about which picture to put on the cover, and that one’s Kevin [Spanky] Long rolling around on the grass laughing, but you can’t quite tell it’s him. It’s special to me just because it’s happy. I hope that the book is happy and not dark. Even though a lot of people died or went through dark things, I kept the book a little bit fun. It’s not The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. No one’s doing drugs. The book is just about friendship and fun. 

RIBEIRO: Totally. Do you have a piece of advice to pass on to the next generation of Tompkins kids that may serve us well?

O’DELL: Yeah. I’ve always had the best luck when I was excited about the subject. I am not afraid to admit that I look up to and admire a lot of the subjects. And I always notice that on Epicly Later’d, the skateboard show, if I’m excited about the person, then we end up making something that I’m excited about. And in the pictures, it’s the same thing. I mean, Ben Cho was someone I really looked up to. Same with Dash. And some of my regrets are times where I started to think I was the special person and not just a lens to talk about these other people. When I was egotistical or resentful, I would get in my own way. That’s what you guys do at Interview. It’s about getting out of my own way.

RIBEIRO: That makes perfect sense. That’s a great place to end. 

O’DELL: If you’re free, we’re doing an episode on Ben Kadow. 

RIBEIRO: Are you inviting me to the Epicly Later’d with Ben Kadow?

O’DELL: The screening. It’s at the Vans Park in Bushwick. As a joke to Ben, because he’s so awkward and nervous, I was like, “Hey, we’re going to screen it in a movie theater and you have to do a Q&A.” And he was like, “All right, I’m down.” I was just joking, and then he said yes. So will you think of a question for him when I do the Q&A? 

RIBEIRO: Dude, yes.

O’DELL: I’m worried no one will have questions. He’s kind of like Andy Kaufman as a skater. I don’t think he’s going to go up there and pontificate about stuff. I think it’ll be pretty brutal.

RIBEIRO: I want to give you a good one. I don’t want to bullshit you.