I would like for this to win

South Florida Daily Blog is holding the 2009 Post of the Year competition right now and a video I put together is in the running. I want it to win.

This is the video.

South Beach, Paradise

South Beach, Paradise.

I’d like it to win for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason is that I want it staying on SFDB’s sidebar as Post of the Year for a year.

And I want it on that sidebar for three simple reasons:

1) We forget. We forget about issues of substance sometimes. And we forget humanity sometimes. In everyday life, we forget.
2) Exposure. Maybe it’ll make a difference. Maybe in someone’s life, it’ll have a really positive effect.
3) SFDB gets a lot more traffic than I do which goes back to reason #1 and #2.

It’s important. I made the video because it matters to me. And it matters to everyone. If not, it should. And for however much I am judged for the rest of my photography/videography, this isn’t something that should fall into the wash.

I’ve gone tit for tat on this, so to speak, in trying to get people to vote for it. On my flickr account where I receive the most traffic, I’ve posted a photo from the video (actually, two) and encouraged people to take the time to vote. I draw a certain audience and I want it out there. This is one of the photos posted (the other one is nude), also one of the primary stills in the video.

It’s funny, a long time ago when I first started shooting models, a friend and I were joking about my tagline. We thought, “Come for the models, stay for the homeless,” was catchy.

I wish that were the case.

And so there. Tit for tat. It matters to me and I can reach a very broad audience. I want this video to be the 2009 Post of the Year and fill that space on SFDB.

I’ve been telling people not to blindly vote for the video. Perhaps, upon reading the other posts, they’ll see another post that they feel is more appropriate for 2009 Post of the Year. By all means, vote for that one.

But seriously consider South Beach, Paradise. Homelessness isn’t something that unusual. Poverty isn’t anything that unusual. In South Beach and in Miami, it’s a little more pronounced because here you have this obvious dichotomy; a world of luxury filled with lush landscapes serving as backdrops for the destitute and the poor. And so here, homelessness and poverty are all the more dramatic. And, in truth, it should never be anything less than dramatic. We forget sometimes. I want this video to be a reminder of that.

Vote here (in case you haven’t already jumped).

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