Really, once I had bought my wife the painting by our friend for our birthday, I ultimately had hoped for a print of one of Estevan Oriol's pictures the following year for my own. Oriol used to be manager for Cypress Hill and is kind of the hip hop Annie Leibovitz. But I don't really care for his hip hop portraitures so much as his photos of gang life in L.A. Being from that area, he has access to the super-stylish cholos more so than some chump ass photographer would get, so it's interesting photo essay stuff, as the "gangstas" let their guard down enough to look somewhat normal within their very bizarre sub-culture. But Oriol has one picture in particular that I saw in Source magazine years ago and clipped and have kept, of some red flannel shirts on clotheshangers hanging on a wire to dry out in a random back yard with an alley present behind with rust-colored sheet metal walls and roofing, and not to get all artsy nerd or anything, but the red shirts and rusty background, not to mention the geometric patterns of the industrial backdrop with the factory fresh square and rectangular designs on the hanging flannel, it's a tight fucking picture. Like rarely have I had photography go to that unexplainable high art plane where it spoke to me in ways I couldn't even consciously justify to anybody (which I just tried to do anyways however), but that pic did it. Others, usually B&W rural photographers like Sally Mann or Shelby Lynn Adams (or whoever that guy is who took pics of the family of retards in West Virginia) or guys taking pics of hobos or freight trains, have spoken to me, but never so strongly through a single image. My wife and me actually looked up his site, but all he had was info on contracting him for photo shoots, nothing about purchasing prints.
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I wasn't familiar with this dude prior to this, so I went and checked some of his stuff out. I couldn't find the picture you described, which I'd really like to see, but I did run across this FHM article that he shot (d'oh!) the subject for. I'm sure there's some embellishment in dude's stories, but DAMN. (The accompanying photo is "FHM - Bloods" under the published section of his site.)
Yeah, he's like the Annie Leibovitz of hip hop so he does a bunch of stupid media shoots, but that street shit is pretty cool. I think the flannel shirt thing may actually have been a tossaway from that Bloods thing. I looked at his site but he doesn't even sell prints. I'm sure we could contact him but we ain't got no fucking money no ways.
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