joanna and i met in september of 2003 when my friend luke showed up at his flat with a poor, homeless american girl. i’d just spent 3 weeks up north cleaning a backpackers and living in a campervan…and i was over it. sure that’s what a real, cool, hippy backpacker does, but…um, it didn’t actually PAY, and i wanted to earn some money.
there were 5 people living in the weird old house…luke, joanna, amy, whatshisface–the lanky vegetarian from up north who was incongruously a total rugger-head (that is, rugby enthusiast), and laura (joanna’s sister.) laura enthusiastically suggested, “share my room!” (her room was quite large and had this lofted cupboard thing that she slept in…so there was plenty of room to throw a mattress in the corner for me.
eventually luke shifted out, laura left, other people moved in, but i stayed in that room sleeping on the mattress in the corner.
a couple years later, in 2005, joanna came to north america for a big inspiration tour…she wanted to see the artistic expression, street art, graphic design happening in the cities. we met up and went on a massive road trip…slept on various friends couches, in a dodgy hostel in montreal, in the car in toronto after a blue jay’s game, walked around the shores of lake michigan, swung by niagara falls…it was a great trip.
she’s now co-launched her own design/art/media company called we love inc and is working her little tail off, because they’re crazy talented and busy…but i insisted that we needed to take a day and have some photo fun. and oh DID we. we took turns styling one another and driving around the city to shoot. (and of course, we couldn’t do something like that without incident…we had to swap the rental car halfway through because it was protesting driving up hills. that’s like getting a car that can’t go up hills in san francisco. just not going to work.) without further ado…the beautiful joanna.
















it was SUCH a fun shoot…if you’d like to see any of the others, you can view the gallery here. (and, of course, when i’ve got more than 2 teasers of the ones she took of me…you’ll get to see ‘em! but, i’ll leave you with: peacock feather, dead body in graffiti-d trash den, gwyn hepburn in roman holiday…)
yes, that is a cow, and that is the central business district skyline, a scant 2.5 kilometers away (about 1.5 miles) (i had my camera set on taking black and white jpegs, which disappointed me when i got home, because this was way cooler in colour.)
it was incredibly windy up there that day!
i told jeremy this was going to be his cd cover…but, uh, he’s not really a musician. so.
after dinner we headed over to 






(hilarious: we had the dress out in front of the motel where everyone was getting ready, and then i saw a bunch of uniformed men come out…and started freaking out. shane isn’t with you guys, is he?! as i tried to shield the dress w/ my 5′3″ frame…while it hung in a tree…apparently he was too nervous to really notice anything that was going on, so…it was ok.)


















shyla’s view
i happen to know that the one on the left here is one of nicki and shane’s favourites–they both use it as their facebook profile picture! (both of these taken by shyla)






yes, they stopped them and made them kiss at each point of the arch.
by shyla