Tuesday, September 19th, 2017


Picked up K, who has returned to LA from Little Rock on Sunday and went with her to an Urban Decay event downtown which she was helping promote. We didn't really know anyone at the event and nothing seemed too interesting, even though it seemed like they invested quite a good amount of money into an In-N-Out food truck, open bars, free tattoos, and some other attraction for the usual LA event goers - which in the case of this one had substantially more girls than guys. At one point I decided to start taking pictures, and used the opportunity to stand in line behind a girl who looked interesting and eventually took a good amount of photos of her. She super photogenic and looked amazing in every picture. Her name is Sierra Swartz, and turns out that she is one of the survivors of the Isla Vista 2014 massacre. She was shot at by Elliot Rodger but managed to escape and enter one of the neighborhood houses. After our little photoshoot, K and I left and went to my place, where I gave her a little gift for our one year anniversary of knowing each other - a framed sheet of stamps of John F. Kennedy, with the riddle I tormented her with for a good two weeks, while she was trying to guess what I got her. It goes like this "What is forever twelve of thirty-five out of forty-five?". She even watched Die Hard 3, under my instructions, to try and figure it out, but alas, I had to give out the second part of the riddle, and by then it took her a quick search in Google to figure out what it was. Afterward we went to Cloak and Dagger. When it ended we got into a loud argument about photography (again...) outside the club and the entire street was staring at us. It just that I believe that any talented accomplished person with good people skills can be a good photographer and she think it requires some special abilities. One of her main points was that she knows a lot of bad photographers. Well, I tried to explain to her that all those bad photographers are also not accomplished individuals. I said that anyone who's famous can be a great photographer because people would be interested in their photos, and they can take photos of their famous friends, and those will be great photos, because famous people look good in photos.  

Sierra Swartz    Ty Joseph and Sierra Swartz