In October 1996, Darren Walker had a vision, and it all started with his love for girls wearing glasses.
Believe it or not, he started this whole craze mostly because of Lisa Loeb!
He saw her video for “Stay” and thought she was the most beautiful woman with glasses he’d ever seen – and still to this day he does not own one of her CDs!
In ‘96, the web was just becoming popular, so Darren went on a quest to find other Lisa Loeb pics (as well as pictures of women with glasses). He didn’t find very many. Darren was also interested in learning how to do web sites, so the light bulb went on… he started a one page site with his AOL account and put up pics of any girls with glasses he could find. He got a huge response from people and the site grew and grew until November of 1997, when he purchased the domain name GirlswithGlasses.com.
By that time Darren was getting rather bored with simply putting up other peoples’ stuff. The light bulb went on again… “Why don’t I take my own pictures? I used to be a good photographer.” Darren asked his ex-wife to do some pictures, then some friends, and finally anyone else who would pose for glasses pics.
By January of 1999, he had enough girls lined up for about 4 months’ worth of photos, so he started featuring a different girl each month.
In October of 1999, the girlswithglasses site went “Gothic” ("I’ve always thought gothic women to be very attractive", says Darren with a smile).
Later that month, Darren received an email from DJ Fernando (who was at the time running the club “Shrine of Lilith“), who was interested in modeling for the site. Although Darren never had the chance to photograph Fernando, he did allow Darren to set up a model search at Shrine of Lilith in November, and they had a great turn out. “I met some of the nicest people there", remembers Darren, including the new owner of the site, Girl Afraid (dani).
In November and December, Darren received a few complaints about too many gothic women on the Girls with Glasses site, so he decided to create a new site and use it as his portfolio, featuring his exclusive work on it.
TwistedLens was born January 1st of 2000.
Since it opened up, all I got was great responses from people… thanks to all of you on my feedback page who said nice things about my work and the models
GirlsWithGlasses has been mentioned on Maxim Magazine and ABC News (online)!
