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Eros Zine: OK, let's go way back to the beginning: Where did you grow up -- and how do you think it influenced your choice of career, and your attitude toward the industry? Forrest Black: I was born in Northern California, in a room full of candles, incense, and revolutionaries. It was in a beautiful home with thirteen black cats and the ghost of the previous owner. The property had previously been a boys camp which had been converted by my parents into the sort of hub of my Father's business. He was the leader and sort of project manager of what was later described as one of the largest drug smuggling operations of the time. They had planes and trucks crossing borders North, West, East and South. Among many other things, he was a major supplier of Ergot to the famous LSD houses of psychedelic era San Francisco, and he believed in what he was doing on a profoundly spiritual level. My Mother was a model and an artist and is one of the most beautiful loving people the world could ever know. So, I kind of grew up with radicals, revolutionaries, and rock stars. We were very close friends with the Grateful Dead and one of my earliest memories was going to the Oakland Cow Palace with several busses chartered by the Hells Angels to go see the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I went to kindergarten with a Free Sonny Barger shirt on. Growing up surrounded by all that clearly instilled a certain libertine perspective and appreciation for counterculture philosophy, art, and politics that is so deeply ingrained in me, I can't imagine who I would be without it. Blue Blood was never really a career choice for me, it's deeper than that. So, some of the trends in adult industry to use some of the labels and terminology of current counterculture in their bid for a certain cool credibility or whatever can occasionally get under my skin, but I am aware that it's not something that needs to be taken too seriously.
Forrest Black: Some of the original objective with Blue Blood was to celebrate all the things that were good and beautiful and enjoyable and meaningful from within the context of a counterculture lifestyle. The various scenes we were involved in, or had visibility to, and in many cases grew up with, were full of interesting eclectic creative people, none of whom were textbook examples of one narrow cultural buzzword or another. But there was a certain commonality of experience and perspective, and we felt like we understood it well enough to create a publication that seemed to color outside the lines but made perfect sense to the right kind of people and quickly became a powerful tastemaker across the board. Casting that wide a net, collecting up the coolest gems from the worlds of music, literature, street fashion, gaming, art, and pop culture, with an eye to expressing what was good and sharing what was quality with our audience has always been an immense undertaking. In some ways the internet has helped and in some ways it's been a bit of a challenge. I love being able to run as many pictures as I like from a great photo shoot, no longer being limited by page count and format constraints. I can even post video to compliment the layout as well. But, on the entertainment writing side, it's possible to become so micro-niche specific these days that it becomes very difficult to know sort of what level to stay at. For example, what once was an entertaining little 150 word bit on a certain industrial fetish esthetic now has seven to ten active blogs and communities dedicated to just that. To deal with transitioning to the sort of unlimited depth of the internet format, Blue Blood has kind of gone two directions online. On the one hand, like you mentioned, we have a lot of sites, each of which has it's own more specific focus. While on the other hand, the central sites, like BlueBlood.net are in many ways more focused on sharing the essential unifying ideas of our counterculture as well as building a community of mature diversely opinionated free thinkers. Eros Zine: How did you get involved with Blue Blood the print magazine? How early in the life of the mag was it? Were you involved with its predecessor BLT?
We collaborated on some pretty cool fringe journalism project really early on. I needed a place to live and she had this sort of legendary collective punkrock group house called Cambodia. She involved pretty much everybody in her projects. People contributed art, witty writing, folding, whatever they could, and we'd have the most insane parties and everyone would get copies of the zine. I contributed a certain design sense and layout, which is also the primary role I took when she decided to create Blue Blood magazine. Along with the occasional written piece, I'm still responsible for a lot of the look and feel for all the various Blue Blood projects today. Eros Zine: When I used to read the print BB, I would drool over the cool layout, including kickass icons in the margins and the like. The layout & physical presentation was one of the things I loved most about the magazine. Can't say why, but I have this suspicion that some of that was your influence, am I right or have I been smoking crack? Forrest Black: Well, I don't know for certain that you haven't been hitting the pipe on your own, but yes, your suspicions are correct. I am responsible for a lot of the look and feel. The cluttered jewelry and cool assorted debris that outlined our entertainment journalism is all my stuff, collected from various portions of my life. It is in some regards a lot like a meaningful sleeve full of tattoos. Every little bit has a certain significance to me. Through Blue Blood, as well as BLT, we were able to work with all sorts of great artists and it was my job to sort of pull all that together and make it work on the page. Amelia had a lot to do with the quality of the production though. She's always been really great at that. Sometimes it's hard to tell where one stops and the other begins. Eros Zine: You and Amelia are credited as a team for your photography. I've had the experience of posing for you and it really was very much a teamwork situation, with the two of you collaborating on background, angles, equipment, etc. Is that still how it works, or does it depend on the situation? Do the two of you also work separately in some circumstances?
Eros Zine: How do you find models? Many of the models who appear on BB and related sites are well known in the industry, but in many cases they appeared before your lens first, before they were known. Do you cruise the mean streets and nightclubs of LA looking for new talent? Does new talent contact you? Or a combination of the above? Forrest Black: Blue Blood has been around for fifteen years and what it stands for is really meaningful to a lot of pretty great people. The quality with which we do things is really appealing to a lot of people as well. So, a fairly staggering number of people have contacted Blue Blood to get involved in any way they can. Some are new and many are very experienced, but what we look for most in photographic subjects is a certain star quality and genuine cool personality. At this point this means we tend to photograph people we've had the chance to meet and get to know. What is going on in someone's head is far more important to us than pretty much any other characteristic. There isn't sort of one channel through which people get to work with Blue Blood, but if you come to events we're doing, participate in our BlueBlood.net community discussions, give us the opportunity to get to know who you are, that's how it usually works best. Eros Zine: What are your favorite types of shoots to do? What elements come together to make the photo shoot that's most enjoyable for you personally? Any favorite examples you can give? Forrest Black: I like photo shoots that sort of come together naturally, where everyone is focused on creating something beautiful and real. I see what I do as having a very strong photo-journalistic foundation, so it has to really be about something or about someone that is genuine and real and interesting. I'm not there to study flaws, but I'm also not there to create some fake artifice with stylists and props. I want to show the world what is amazing and compelling about the people we're shooting. People's parents tend to love the pictures we take of them, and that means a lot to me because it means we really captured that person in a positive attractive and yet still realistic recognizable way.
Forrest Black: Obviously, some shoots are harder than others, but nobody is forcing us to do anything that's too much of a pain in the ass. Sometimes if someone we've worked with turns out to be disappointing on a personal level, it's difficult to be objective about their photos. The pictures are all very connected to to people for me. The people in the pictures are not just a fine body put there to hold a form I'm trying to create from my head. I suppose Amelia likes to shoot daring things in very public places and I really don't enjoy doing that at all, but I do tend to love the results. Eros Zine: Hanging out in LA with you, as I have on several occasions, it often feels like you know everyone and cool and moderately famous people just somehow show up wherever you are. Do you often run into people whose work you've admired who it turns out have been wanting to meet you? Have you achieved rockstar status or on a daily basis do you tend to blend in? Forrest Black: People at a certain level tend to feel really comfortable around us. We're not going to be all weird and starstruck and pushy, and we're also not going to be all bitter and hateful about their successes. If they have done something cool and perhaps inspiring or noteworthy, we're probably going to do our best to show that to the world. I've found that to be true wherever we go, but there are certainly a lot of great and talented people in cities like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and such. There are a lot of people all over the world that are very much into Blue Blood and the work that we do, and that's been true since before the internet, so I think there is just a mutual respect we've earned with the various rock stars, artists, and pop culture personalities that have visibility to that. There are certainly days I can feel challenged by the road less travelled being hard and all that, but really I'm very grateful and appreciative to have the opportunities and freedom that comes from being involved in Amelia G's media empire.
Forrest Black: I guess the most recent big adjustment is that we've consolidated a number of our individual websites under the BlueBlood.com membership area. Now, members of RubberDollies.com, GothicSluts.com, and BarelyEvil.com have access to all the content of all of those sites, as well as the BlueBlood.com content. This includes well over 80,000 of our magazine quality images, lots of great erotic fiction, interviews with a bunch of our cool girls, and our super sexy counterculture couples layouts, which were the foundation of the original magazine. From day one, all the erotic pictorials in the magazine were real couples and we're very pleased to continue those great layouts for members of the BlueBlood.com site. We've got some stuff going up right now that will knock your socks off. Eros Zine: What are some of your favorite upcoming projects you're into working on? Are there some really radical things you'd like to get into doing in the future? What are your next upcoming projects that fans can look for? Forrest Black: Blue Blood is a constantly evolving project. We sort of pave the road as we go. We're always experimenting with something or other and whenever we find something that works, we put it out there for people into what we do. There are some really great things on the horizon for Blue Blood, but right now I'm really pleased with where things are at with the BlueBlood.com membership site and the free BlueBlood.net community news and networking site. Blue Blood's fifteen year anniversary is just around the corner and we've got some really fun stuff in store. Eros Zine: Thanks, Forrest! In case you missed it, you can find Forrest's work at BlueBlood.com and check out his blog at forrestblack.livejournal.com.
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