Thanks for the explanation. Some of those bottles could be fun stunts at a garden party! But the $60 is, er, sobering.

Very good news about your wife and her recent acclaim! Glad you have found a fun life there in Chile.

Best,

Two years ago I was commissioned by a Chilean magazine called La CaV to make three portraits of winemaker Grant Phelps, a Kiwi who lives and works in Chile. Infact him and me are the only Gringo inhabitants of Santa Cruz.
For the shoot we bought 12 breakaway glass bottles from a store in Hollywood California. The bottles cost sixty US dollars each, more than most wines, though much more entertaining than MOST wines as well.

We filled the bottles with Syrah and had Grant smash them with either his head or his fist. The head ones (As in the one above) were considered too violent to publish.

The PDF of the article can be downloaded from my website. Under La CaV side heading “Publications”

Hope this explains it for you.

Cheers
MAtt

By “you people,” I assume you mean reddit since that’s where I stated that I found it?

As you can see, our intention here with this image was to have some fun. And, 26 comments in, I think you can see that we’ve done that.

Now that you’ve informed us that you are the photographer, perhaps we can turn it into a bit of publicity for you too: everyone check out Matt’s web site at http://www.mattwilson.cl/! I particularly like the winemaker portraits, which are much more original than the usual staid poses in front of rows of vines. Since reddit really is a traffic tsunami, maybe you would want to submit some of the watermarked photos to reddit yourself to drive traffic to your own site? Anyway, hopefully this credit is enough to let us keep up this reduced size, cropped version of your impressive image.

Perhaps you could let us know the backstory–how you did it, who is the subject in the photo, and just how many stitches did he require afterward?

Best,

(But just to cover my own Intellectual Property issues: I’m doing a series of paintings entitled exactly that; which look nothing like this photograph.)

(Apologies to Homer Simpson)

or

The good news is that Bill is now seaworthy, the bad news is he lives in Kansas.