Photography Smashed Android Jon Hillenbrand, November 12, 2010October 17, 2019 Hey blog. It’s like 3am. I am obviously not going to fall asleep any time soon despite a killer-busy day today which ended at 10:30pm. I don’t know what PM stands for but it feels like post mortem after the longer days. So I was laying in bed just now…
Photography Adaptive Preference Formation Jon Hillenbrand, November 7, 2010October 17, 2019 You can’t reach the grapes so they are probably not ripe anyway, right? This attitude is known as Adaptive Preference Formation. It’s what we do, as humans, to justify our failures. The other day, I had to do a photo shoot where I KNEW that most of the photos were never…
Photography The Mystery of the Exploding Girl Jon Hillenbrand, October 24, 2010October 17, 2019 I can’t think of anything to write about tonight so I am just going to start writing and see if anything comes out of my head in opposition to my writer’s block. Maybe I should simply describe the above photo. I took this shot back in 2005. It was a…
Poetry I remember this Jon Hillenbrand, October 21, 2010December 30, 2015 You’ll know if this makes sense to you: “And it starts, sometime around midnight. Or at least that’s when you lose yourself for a minute or two. As you stand, under the bar lights. And the band plays some song about forgetting yourself for a while. And the piano’s this…
Photography All these things that I’ve done Jon Hillenbrand, October 14, 2010October 17, 2019 Tomorrow is my birthday. Thirty-six. Alla, the girl who cuts my hair, says I’m just a baby though an increasing percentage of the clipped hair falling from her scissors is silver. She’s getting married for the second time now at forty-five and I’ve never seen her happier. She insists that…
Poetry Ten Minute Lunch Jon Hillenbrand, October 5, 2010December 30, 2015 Today I spent ten minutes eating my lunch on the rickety wire furniture adrift in the shadow of a building. These autumn days chill shadowed areas to blue, but I was not shivering because of the cold and the shadow was cast not by the sun, but by the presence of my former love inside….
Photography Metrics Jon Hillenbrand, October 2, 2010October 17, 2019 Some people I work with don’t care about anything other than successful numbers. As someone involved in creating artwork for a living, it’s difficult to mesh with that metrics-based world. But I do keep track of almost everything I do at work so just for fun, here are some of…
Photography Thoughts on Thoughts Jon Hillenbrand, September 29, 2010October 17, 2019 I am Captain Insomnia. My super power is the ability to stay awake forever. Sometimes I just can’t get my brain to shut the hell up. It’s probably clinical and can be treated with a pill which will destroy other parts of my life. Fuck, anything I write seems self-servingly…
Photography Et maintenant au Congo Jon Hillenbrand, August 30, 2010October 17, 2019 Often when I am photographing wealthy socialites partying or buying art on the north shore of Chicago, I think of a friend of mine, Amy Ernst, who is in the Congo right now taking amazing photos of interesting people. But she’s not there to take photos, she’s doing her part…
Photography Cracking Open the Omniverse Jon Hillenbrand, August 24, 2010October 17, 2019 Today I experienced a cranial disaster resulting from a singularity in all space and time. It all started way back when my parents decided not to have any more children after the birth of my older sister Sarah. Sixteen months later, I was a newborn being carried around the hospital by…
Poetry Life Should Be Delicious Jon Hillenbrand, August 18, 2010December 30, 2015 I woke up with vomit in my mouth. The kind of dirty stink that makes you run to a cup of anything to change the experience. All night I had been bent at the waist, feeling my body implode, stopped only by the frozen stomach muscles that I hadn’t felt…
Poetry True Colors Jon Hillenbrand, August 18, 2010December 30, 2015 Would that the man on the moon were a lonely fellow, perhaps reclining against the slope of some great crater, he might say that he had more insight under the print of his thumb than all of the Earthling extrospection gleamed from upon the snowy vantage of Everest. Perhaps he…
Photography Universal Tooth Jon Hillenbrand, August 10, 2010October 17, 2019 Debating the details of someone’s core beliefs is an entertaining yet usually pointless endeavour; but let slip the dogs of war, I say. I once argued with a girl for what felt like two hours about the existence of Universal Truth, she on the, “it obviously exists,” side and me on the, “you can never prove it,”…
Photography Medium Sized Jon Hillenbrand, August 4, 2010October 17, 2019 After college, I lived in Kankakee County in a small town called Momence for a while. There were only a few hundred people living there with a main street no longer than 10 or 15 blocks long, and that’s being generous. It was far from work, but in the neighborhood…
Photography Mother and Daughter Jon Hillenbrand, August 3, 2010October 17, 2019 I’m sure there’s some sort of life lesson to learn from the massive striped spider which has been constantly making a web on the side of my car door. But I really don’t care because the damn thing scares the crap out of me every time I jumps out at…