by Claire O'Neill

Just about everyone knows about The Big Picture by now. Boston.com's blog featuring enormous photos won the Webby award for best use of photography last week. Hidden beneath it on the list, however, was a lesser known and far less conventional nominee — LyndonWade.com.

A journey through the Web site reveals an theatrical world of fantasy, youth and violence — sobbing children fleeing from birds, pimply-faced teenagers and circus freaks. The site seems to sense when you want to move on and an arrow appears propelling you to the next surreal microcosm. Ultimately you're left wondering what sort of twisted individual came up with such images? We decided to give him a call.

  • Lyndon Wade created a series called Room "107" around possible scenarios in a cheap motel room.
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    Lyndon Wade created a series called Room "107" around possible scenarios in a cheap motel room.
  • Whenever he stays in a hotel, Wade says, he becomes obsessed with thinking about who stayed there before.
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    Whenever he stays in a hotel, Wade says, he becomes obsessed with thinking about who stayed there before.
  • Wade took a series of photos of frightened children for his series "The Birds," inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 movie by the same name.
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    Wade took a series of photos of frightened children for his series "The Birds," inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 movie by the same name.
  • Stanley Winston, who did the special effects for the Terminator movies and Edward Scissorhands created an animatronic raven for the shoot that was replicated multiple times in post-production.
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    Stanley Winston, who did the special effects for the Terminator movies and Edward Scissorhands created an animatronic raven for the shoot that was replicated multiple times in post-production.
  • Wade considers himself more of a director, plotting out visual stories, than a photographer.
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    Wade considers himself more of a director, plotting out visual stories, than a photographer.
  • An image taken for Wad magazine's anniversary issue.
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    An image taken for Wad magazine's anniversary issue.
  • Not everyone will succumb to Wade's bizarre requests. Actors Michael Cera (left) and Jonah Hill politely scoffed at his request to turn them into old Jewish men with a lot of makeup and warts.
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    Not everyone will succumb to Wade's bizarre requests. Actors Michael Cera (left) and Jonah Hill politely scoffed at his request to turn them into old Jewish men with a lot of makeup and warts.
  • Strange tends to beget more strange. Wade was hired to shoot advertisements for Eminem's clothing line Shady. The idea here is that Eminem is breeding little Slim Shadies, like himself, through his clothes.
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    Strange tends to beget more strange. Wade was hired to shoot advertisements for Eminem's clothing line Shady. The idea here is that Eminem is breeding little Slim Shadies, like himself, through his clothes.
  • Donald Trump might not like the aesthetic, but he surely would appreciate Wade's self-marketing savvy.
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    Donald Trump might not like the aesthetic, but he surely would appreciate Wade's self-marketing savvy.

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Surely this Lyndon fellow would inhabit a dark cavern in Transylvania (or at least an edgy loft in Brooklyn), but no — he's a Kansas City boy. And his "I'm going to shock you" project is a family affair. He runs a studio with his photographer brother David Lindsey Wade and his mother. The Web site was the result of a collaboration with Hello Monday, a design group based out of Denmark. They asked him, "What do you love?" His answer was "Alfred Hitchcock" and thus a crazy site was born.

In a vast sea of talented young photographers, it's hard to stand out. Trying to be more Web savvy and shocking than his peers seems to be the 27-year-old Wade's technique for getting ahead. Is he an innovator, pushing boundaries, or simply a clever recycler of old cliches? We'll leave that to you to decide. But whatever it is, it's working. Wade's client list includes big hitters like Sony, Virgin, Coke, Pepsi and Saatchi NY. He made the Eisner Museum of Advertising & Design's list of top 15 photographers in America.

Why the obsession with black eyes and awkward children? "I think I just get interested in extremes," he says. You can thank a serene childhood for that. "We grew up on some land in Kansas. My brother and I were weird little kids, and we didn't have a whole lot going on, so it forced us to be really creative, I think."

His creative extremes don't always go over well in Kansas City. He couldn't get anyone to print "Room 107," a series he created around possible happenings in a cheap hotel room. Printers told him that the photos seemed "too real" and they didn't want people thinking they'd print "porn" and suicide. He eventually found someone who was willing to do it. With the prints, they gave him some religious tapes.

"I appreciated it, 'cause it really saved me," he says, laughing.

And what are these strange images for? Mostly just for Wade's Web site, which functions as a form of self-promotion. Rather than wait around for someone to fund his passion projects, Wade goes for them full force.

"We shoot what we'd like to get work-wise," he explains. And once he's done with his self-financed creations, generously paid gigs reliably follow. If all the unemployed people in America took his approach to getting a job — a strange place this world would be.

By Heather Murphy

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