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Browsing her website, you’ll find a shit load of twenty-somethings. Bare-skinned and covered in ink. Mostly her friends; they’re band members, former boyfriends, former flings. Lying on a mattress with a significant baring all, offering modesty with a well-placed hand or a shared corner of bed linen. Picture after picture, it’s all cigarettes and music and sin that’s just innocent enough. The kind of work that easily develops an image viewed to a story told.

First converging a few blocks north, Chicago photographer Stephanie Bassos and I met for drinks at Lemmings On Damen after finding hipster hotspot Danny’s haunted by a gaggle of aging broads. Hair like Hilary, wine like Lohan, they were busy getting in as much crazy as they could before the arthritis aches kicked in. All fun, but too loud for an interview. This was a month or so back.

“I’m a huge people person,” offers Bassos over two full pints. “And you know when people see good photos of themselves and it’s just the best feeling? They’re like, ‘Wow, I look really good. I’m going to put this on Facebook.’ It’s the pleasure of seeing themselves the way they want to be seen. I like being able to give people that feeling.”

Despite graduating with a degree she never plans to use and a photography background limited to an academic’s excuse to get proper drunk by studying abroad, 27 year-old Bassos has developed quite the portfolio. A collection of work not terribly laden with photo-school rhetoric, yet still coming off like one that’s been through the visual ringer. Her style is raw and natural. Like the way a gimpy T. Hanks loses his metal legs in Forrest Gump and suddenly gets all Usain Bolt down a dirt road. See, some people just have it. And Stephanie Bassos has it.

Initially moving to the city for school because she had terrible grades and Columbia offered open admissions, Michigan-born Bassos begrudgingly chose a concentration. “I thought I was going to be a mediocre writer my whole life. That was the only thing I was ever even slightly good at,” she explains. “That, and golf.”

And since swinging an iron in the butchy LPGA wasn’t in the leggy brunette’s cards, she opted to pursue a degree in Magazine Journalism. It was halfway through a nightmare internship at a Georgia-based periodical that Bassos spit out any interest she’d previously choked down for the written craft. “Paste Magazine sucked. But I can actually thank them because they made me never want to write for another magazine as long as I lived.”

Then she started taking pictures. A lot of them. So much so in fact, that with only a semester to go in a degree she hated, Bassos skipped town and country and signed up for a semester abroad studying photography. On a whim. In Italy.

“I found the program on the last day and I booked it on that same day. I got on the plane and the teacher knew that I didn’t have a photography background, even asking if I had the forethought to bring a camera.”

Unsure, I asked if she did, in fact, remember to bring a camera.

Sheepishly, she admits that yeah, “I did bring one. I mean, it was like, just a shitty point ‘n shoot.”

But unlike the shiny and bulky SLRs holstered by her fellow students, Bassos was able to take her crap camera everywhere. Hiking down narrow streets or drinking in small town Grecian pubs. Taking pictures along the way, she developed a close bond with the idea of image capture. “I started seeing things differently and when I got back, I just never stopped,” she says. “And then I became obsessed with it.”

Seizing metropolitan glances at their most pure, Bassos’ technique subtracts the tired “get ready, get set” approach or the corny “say cheese” dick rub. Her best work cuts through the crap. Simply taking the damn picture. Freezing the innocence of a diapered toddler found in a Millennium Park fountain with one photo, while successfully elevating a gnarled senior from weathered to beautifully fragile in another. Moments both large and small, the ugly and the elegant; Bassos delivers the world in natural form. And although the gamut is run, her top-shelf shit revolves around the gorgeously f*cked-up peers she surrounds herself with. The drugged out misfits and the rail-thin friends; their greased ethnic hair hanging long and low. The kind of kids who’d easily trip and stumble alongside the celebrity train-wreck she hopes to one day work with.

“I want to photograph Mary-Kate Olson,” a not-quite sober Bassos surrenders. Or maybe blurts out.

“What? Is that like, your main goal in life?”

“It’s not my main goal in life, but it’s one person I’d really like to photograph.”

Weighing as much as D.J. Tanner (before she got all gross and fat in Season 4), the beer’s hitting me as well. Trying to flirt, I start to get snippy. “Do you have a weird obsession with Full House or what? Why not Uncle Joey or a concert shot of Jesse and the Rippers?”

“Well, I do love Full House and John Stamos. There’s something about Mary-Kate though. I think I’d photograph her well. Then I can get business from her…so really, I just want to use Mary-Kate Olson.”

“Like a stepping stone? Like a little, abnormally thin and straggly stepping stone?”

“She’s not that straggly. I think she’s really pretty.”

“I think she kinda looks like an alien. Or like a Cabbage Patch doll, but with really sunken eyes.”

“I’m going to pretend I’m not offended.”

“She kinda looks like…Ashley Olson.”

Stephanie ignores my snark and tries to cap the topic, “It could be a really creative photo-shoot… and I just think we’d really click.”

“Kind of arrogant of you,” I add. Not so fast, Bassos. I don’t care how cute your feather earrings are…

In addition to documenting her hip and reckless artsy cohorts, Stephanie is good friends with Richard Edwards, the frontman for moody modern-rockers Margot and The Nuclear So and So’s, and keeps company with Barsuk Record’s up-and-comers Maps & Atlases. Doing a good amount of work for the latter, but handling all photography for the former. Including the cover for Margot’s latest album, Buzzard.

“The picture’s about five years old. At least,” Bassos elaborates. “Or probably more like three. It’s of this girl named Chris. She was in my Italian study abroad program and she was my first model. Originally, I just wanted to be her friend because she was so fascinating to look at.”

“Any real story behind the picture?” I ask.

“Of course. It was my second photo shoot with her and I went to her house, and she had just gotten a second bird because she had slammed her first in a door.”

“In a door?”

“Yeah. It was flying out and she was shutting the door, and the bird just hit it and died. Just really bad timing. So she got a new bird.”

At this point I’m kinda bonked on IPA. I laugh.

“No, it’s not funny. She was devastated.”

“Well, yeah. She should be, she killed the f*cking bird…”

“It wasn’t her fault.”

“She shut the door, it was her fault. Call PETA. I want PETA on that, stat.”

Three, or six beers in and Bassos too easily admits she isn’t quite up to technological snuff. She says she’s not Photoshop literate, that she “can’t edit out ear zits or frizzy hair or anything like that.” Which is a total buzz-kill for those looking to erase a leaky lip herp, but also poses another question: What sets her apart from the other 100 or so uneducated semi-adults with fancy cameras running ‘round the Windy City, masquerading as professional photographers?

“I often wonder this myself. Because I see kids wander around with their nice cameras and I know some of them went to school for photography. They have these pictures that are so perfectly lit and everything. But their content, is lacking.” Bassos pauses, then takes a drink and a moment. “So what exactly sets me apart?”

Not knowing if she’s asking herself I chime in, “See, I know a lot of photogs and most of them went to school, obtained a degree, and know all the technical crap. But here you are, coming from an alternative route-”

“-Okay. I love photography, I love it. And I think it shows in my work,” Stephanie’s focus narrows and her resolve thickens. “You can know everything and not have the eye for it. Or you can have the eye for it, then learn stuff. What I need to do is learn stuff. Then I can go from being a good photographer, to a great photographer.”

It may be an admission, but at least Bassos accepts her own professional flaws, and it’s because of these flaws that her work communicates such a raw and unforgiving style. Her Magazine Journalism degree notwithstanding, Bassos is like a junkie with an endless supply. Riding high on instinct.

Finishing up drinks and Saturday night chit-chat, like a limp dick I look for an effective closing. And no, despite her unassuming beauty and the seven pints of courage I spent two hours downing, I don’t attempt to take her home (okay, maybe mental fingers were kinda crossed). Instead I gravely remind her of the calendar date, then asked her where she was all those years back. It being 9/11 and all.

“I was just about to go to school. I looked down the balcony to where my parents were watching the news and they were like, ‘Go put gas in the cars.’”

“That’s what they said? That was their advice?”

“Yup. They thought gas prices would go up. I have no idea. They thought the world was ending and that people would need gas. My best friend worked at a car wash, so I put gas in several cars that day.”

“I mean, I guess no one really knew what was happening.”

“I felt really bad and listened to a lot of Ani DiFranco. She wrote a poem about it.”

“And Stephanie, are you always going to remember that day?”

“I will never forget that day. Ever.”

Wow. Who would’ve thought the opening ceremonies of the ‘98 Commonwealth Games would’ve made such an impact. Then again, the games were held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; the first Asian country to host the games. I’ll drink to that.

Never forget kids.

Note: All pics (excluding Margot cover) taken by writer Adam Himebauch for article, not photographer Stephanie Bassos

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