Efron Danzig On New Book, ‘Diary #1’

All photos shot by Efron danzig and courtesy of raw meat.

Diary #1 is the first ever photo book from the New York-based, photographer, model and skateboarder Efron Danzig.

A one hundred and forty two page visual memoir shot between 2023 and 2024, that gives an extremely intimate insight into Efron’s life. Highlighting the moments that skim past us - from the alone time, to moments with lovers and friends - Efron reminds us that there is sentimentality in the everyday. The book is published by New York-based publisher Raw Meat who describes the book as ‘Tenderness at its core’, and it’s true, there is a certain tenderness to Efron’s photos; they are as honest as they can be. 35mm film photos all unedited, scanned straight from prints. It is tender as it is raw - a perfect showcase of what life is like as a twenty four year old living in one of the greatest cities on earth. 

The book is available from Raw Meat, which you can buy here.

Congratulations on the release of the book! How are you feeling now it’s out?

I feel pretty good. I was nervous to have the book release party, but it was on the roof so I could smoke cigarettes which made me feel better [laughs]. It was sweet, my mom, dad and a lot of my friends came. My heart was very warm.

I could imagine it being so scary having your first book come out, especially being a body of work that is so personal.

Oh yeah. I try not to overthink it, or I feel like I naturally don’t overthink it, which is good for my peace of mind. I’m just excited overall.

How long were you working on the book for?

The earliest photo was from a year and a half ago.

Were you thinking about the book that whole time?

I was just shooting for fun and learning more about photography. Then I met Kyle [Quinn] (Owner of Raw Meat) at a book fair, we were talking, I told him I take photos and gave him my email. He hit me up a few weeks later being like, ‘Hey, remember me from the bookfair. Can I see some photos?’. I sent him sixty and he said ‘These are cool, send me more’ so I sent him five hundred. Then he told me he wanted to make a book. It came about really easily and naturally. I told him that I wasn’t ready to finish it yet and needed another year of shooting, so he let me have that and take my time working on it until I got it to a point where I felt like it was done.

Kyle is so sweet, the emails he’s been sending me are so nice, you can tell he really cares.

I know. Kyle is the sweetest. 

How did you cut down the photos from the five hundred?

I sent him five hundred but I cut that down from around a thousand selects. I sent him the better photos to just be like this is what I’ve been doing. I do this photo project every month with my friend Jimi where he takes a photo of me on a large format camera, gives me advice on photography and teaches me how to photo assist because I have no formal education and really want to learn. I met him on a shoot where I was modelling, and he was the photographer. I asked him if he can teach me stuff, so we came up with this idea to do these portrait sessions as a way for him to teach me about photography. He was the one who helped me narrow everything down, so we got it to ninety something photos for the book.

Damn, that’s so sick you’re doing that. I’ve been doing the same thing, like begging my friends who are photographers to teach me and help me out.

Yeah, and it’s nice to have that community. I have a lot of friends who are photographers too, so I text them all the time asking questions. I’ll send them my photos and be like ‘Why does this photo work or how could this be better?”. Or I’ll send them photos I like and ask them how they made it look a certain way.

How would you describe the book?

It’s basically a diary, very journalistic and I wanted it to read as such.

Are you much of a writer?

I used to write a lot of poetry but now I write more matter of fact like, ‘I did this, I did that, I met up with this person and we were here’ and that’s how I wanted the book to be. Gratitude lists too.

That’s a really nice way for it to be, it works well with the diary theme.

Yeah, I didn’t want to overcomplicate things and I have other projects I’m working on that are separate from this. I wanted this to be self-portraits and people I love, where it’s like, someone smoking in my kitchen, I’m cooking eggs in my kitchen, I’m driving in the car with this person, etc.

That’s such a nice way for that to be, most of my favourite books are like that.

Yeah, I am a big fan of Nan Goldin, Ari Marcopolous, Ryan McGinley and Jim Goldberg. I love his journal entries and how his subjects write over their photos.

Have you ever been on a shoot with Jim Goldberg before?

Yeah, the first shoot I ever did was with him. He took some photos of me, and we had a conversation that he recorded and then he had me write some of the conversation over the print and he scanned that in. It’s cute, sometimes he will message me randomly, he is very kind. He has so much care, he really tries to understand everyone he shoots. That’s something I really want to have with my own work, like that amount of care for all the subjects.

That is really cool, it is so nice when the photographer is making sure everyone is comfortable.

You can tell, it’s really reflected in the photo if someone is comfortable or not. It’s special when a photographer goes out of their way to make you feel comfortable. I showed Jimi a photo of mine one time and he said that the person in the photo looked guarded, that has always stuck with me. 

Nan Goldin is my favourite photographer. The way she was able to document her life is something I really admire, especially in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

That one is my favourite of her books. The first time I saw it I was at a friend’s house, I looked through and was just glued to it, it really opened my eyes. The orangey, yellow, tungsten light, I love. It just feels very honest, and I wanted to reflect that in my own work. There’s no post editing done to any of the photos in my book, I wanted them to exist as they were naturally taken. It felt more honest to me that way. 

You live in the area where Nan lived during that time. Do you feel an added connection to the book living in the same area?

Oh, for sure. The area has changed but there are parts that are still the same and you can definitely feel that connection. The mentality is still the same. It’s funny, I was watching this movie ‘200 Cigarettes’ and Courtney Love and Paul Rudd are having a conversation out front of this bar that I play pool at all the time and smoke exactly where they are standing.

That is nuts.

The history is all still here.

What do you think of Courtney Love?

I am such a fucking fan of Courtney Love. She is fabulous.   

Okay, thank god because I think Hole are one of the most underrated bands of all time.

Oh my god, for sure, especially because she was portrayed as living in the shadow of Kurt [Cobain], which I don’t see whatsoever. I see her fully as her own entity. She is a force of a person; she is fully her own thing and a lot of the connection between them musically is unfair because she is her own genius in herself.

Also, her song writing is amazing. All the lyrics on Live Through This are so good.

The ‘Rockstar [Demo]’ is so good.

I found this early EP they made and there is a cover of ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ on it and it is one of the best covers I’ve ever heard.

Send me that, what the fuck! I love her personality too; she doesn’t give a fuck. I love watching her interviews and just hearing her talk.

What made you want to pick up a camera?

A few years ago, I tore my MCL, ACL and Meniscus. I couldn’t skate for a year and then I could skate for six months and then it hurt again, and I had to get another little knee surgery to clean things up. It was like two years of not being able to skate that much. That’s when I started taking a lot of photos and documenting my life.

I had a similar thing, I hurt both my ankles in one year and couldn’t skate for a year all up. Then in the last few months I got a camera, and I was quickly like, okay this is my new thing that I am obsessed with. 

It is so easy to become obsessed with it too because there is so much to it. Earlier on, I used photography to document the mundanity of life. With self-portraits especially, with all of them I am alone, you know. It is nice to capture loneliness, I don’t think I am a lonely person, but everyone feels lonely from time to time, I think it’s nice to capture those feelings.

I feel like it is so nice to have the photo element to capture those emotions, especially when they are emotions I find myself writing about so freely.

Yeah, on the flipside, I am able to capture my friends, the people I care about and all the love in my life as well. 

There is something so nice about capturing everything.

It’s so nice to look back and read a journal entry or look at a photo of your friend from a few years ago and remember that day and what you were doing.

Yeah, I think that’s what I really get out of looking at the work of people older than me. Looking at Nan Goldin’s work and how well she documented her life and it’s like that’s what I want to be able to have, a documentation of my life.

Yeah, just all of it. You know that photo of Nan where her face is all bruised because she had gotten beaten by her boyfriend at the time?

Yeah.

There is this Ryan McGinley photo from his book The Kids Were Alright, it’s funny because there are two photos in that book that I especially love and they’re both self-portraits or maybe his boyfriend took one of them. One he has blood on his face and the other one he has cum on his face. The story is that he was kissing his boyfriend, these guys tried to fight them and he head butted the guy and it was the other guys blood on his face. He ran back to his apartment and took that photo. I fucking love that, documenting the blood and documenting the cum.

Those are both so confronting but there really is no point of only documenting the good when life isn’t always good.

The good is the cum the bad is the blood. [laughs].

Exactly [laughs]. Looking back now, how do you feel about this year, where would it rank on the scale of best to worst year of your life?

I wouldn’t want to go back to it, but it was a Jordan year of sorts, like modelling, skating and being fulfilled emotionally. But you never know you can always one up yourself. Never look back, always look forward. Even with this book, the day it came out, I was excited to work on the next one, already thinking of ideas. It’s best not to dwell on what you’ve done and move forward. My friend told me that day, to ‘Just let yourself have it. Revel in it for a moment’ because I don’t like to revel in achievements, I do like to keep my head down and keep on trucking. 

Let yourself have it, you worked hard on it. What’s the next project you want to work on?

I have a lot of photos that I love that aren’t in this book, because I’ve been shooting every day and the book has been finished since the spring. I’m thinking about the next book and this little bike lane book I want to make of weird crazy ass people on like 6th Ave, like businessmen on hoverboards. I want to make another Diary, but I want to wait three or four years. I want to give myself the space to really collect photos.

That’ll be so sweet having the Diary’s when you’re old and you can be like ‘That was me when I was 24 and this is me when I was 30’.

I know. I want to take self-portraits until I am a grandma [laughs]. I was really inspired by this one book of self-portraits. I feel like it’s this book that everyone has, they go to Dashwood, and they buy this fucking book. It’s this lady and she documents herself from when she’s pretty young, through her adulthood and pregnancy and post-pregnancy, it’s really beautiful and that was one of the most inspiring things in terms of self-portraits. I really appreciate the amount of time that spans over that book and I would love to do that myself.

That will seriously be so nice to have. Other than the new projects, what's next for you from here?

I’m just about to get some salmon from the grocery store and cook it with my roommate, I’m hungry [laughs]. Just keep skating, I’m filming for this Violet video that’s coming out early next year, trying to focus on that. I know fashion week is at the end of this month so hopefully do some stuff for that.