You know this face, but for the record, the name is Danny Trejo. You've probably seen him as the bad guy (or apparent bad guy) in one of the more than 100 films he's been in over the last three decades. And while you might think that he really is a badass, well, you're right. Sort of.

— "The vampires are always there. They never leave me."

People come and people go. Then there are individuals who affect us so deeply they burn a brand on our hearts forever.

Outside of the obvious rock and movie stars, there are few people in the world that have influenced pop culture more than skate icon Jay Adams. Unwittingly, Jay and a group of skateboarders took the scraps of urban decay in a recession era LA beach town and built an entire subculture from them. His dynamic surfing and especially his skating lit up the world and awakened it to living life on the edge.

"Turn right here," Mr. Estevan says, directing the driver of his newly purchased 1962 Lincoln Continental into one of L.A.’s burned out backstreets, where the old heart of the city can be traced by following its veins, the streetcar tracks, which once pumped blood in and out of a thriving downtown. Here, too, is where Estevan intends to photograph his subject, Academy Award winner Adrien Brody.

Adrien steps out onto the pavement and click, click, click, in under an hour, the shoot is complete, cover and center spread accomplished, using one or two lenses, no lights, no assistant.

With his over wrought pompadour rocking and his signature Gretsch hollow-body guitar twanging away, Brian Setzer arrived on the U.S. pop music scene with a vengeance in the early 1980s. Up to that point, American audiences were OK with reruns of Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days—all benign depictions of a clichéd 1950s heartland America.