Category Archives: Conception

Evolution Of A Culture

I am completely obsessed with building the website now and I seem to work on it non-stop. I reached out to many of the talented people whom I have gotten to know over this past year and the whole project is becoming a wonderful collaboration of so many wonderfully talented people. Ideas are abundant, and the possibilities unlimited. I see now that this will grow well beyond myself and am coming up with a vision for the future where part of it will become a platform for others to come together. I have been searching the web for a long time trying to make some sort of connection to others who do what I do, and it has been very scattered. It seems once I find something that is working it suddenly disappears. I am not creating just a website, but a Joomla interface which becomes a dynamic portal engine and content management system that can be shared by many and has the potential to become quite interactive. In a sense, this can become a sort of space that becomes a clearinghouse for gay arts, written, and visual. However, that is many steps and stages away: but it is my long term vision of what The Naked Man Project will eventually become when the blog part of this project ends at the close of this year. Right now I am having a blast just putting myself together as The Naked Man Project and learning the process.

I realize through my many years I have been obsessed with finding my identity as a gay man and the evolution of its culture over the past 30 years. It has changed so drastically from one extreme to the other: being apprehensive and filled with self-doubt and self-loathing now to the point where we can be married in many states. Montana not included. There is so much that has captivated me along the way, wondrous things that can very easily become lost in the shadows of our evolution. Much that the new generation has taken for granted and probably doesn’t even care to know from which its origins spring. But it really begins with the naked self and how we look at ourselves in that mirror each day. I feel a lot of being gay has been a projection on what we wanted to become and a rejection of the values from which we come. We can so easily become paralyzed by our own internalized homophobia. Our safety and security jeopardized by our inability to communicate with each other. Sure, the social networks are creating a web of friends we can interact with, but our decreasing lack of skills toward communication seems to be minimalized to a mere tweet that now must be deciphered to understand its value. Manhunt and Craigslist still rules supreme for anyone wanting to hook up, often without even getting to know their names, merely for a moment of gratification, and then moving on. Why do we still live in a world that values being anonymous? I do have to say the images and profiles on Manhunt are becoming captivating and creative from an artist point of view, as we try to express the core of our sexual/sensual selves as it becomes the new calling card which we hang our identity. But it is a world where a man of my age is shunned from even being acknowledged no mater how creative or witty I become. Perhaps we no longer need relationship or companions. Perhaps our lives have become so busy that we no longer need that interaction. It’s like art, have we become so saturated with it that it no longer contains any intrinsic value. I always envisioned a future where as we evolved as a gay community that we would somehow become closer to each other as a culture. But it has become the opposite, that vastness just grows wider and more distant.

But I also find a vast richness and body of friends on the Internet that are enriching my life and helping me move toward a greater understanding and vision of myself. In many ways it is awesome to stand here at this moment and look out over a magnificent world of possibilities.

End Of Summer

Something in the air changes and it suddenly feels like fall. Labor Day is somehow that turning point weekend in the United States where the day after summer seems to disappear. It was the first football game of the season, the final family campout, and the last days of the rodeo. This morning I began putting together my fall schedule that will take me through to the end of the year. The University in back in session and I begin a new season of working on their shows tomorrow night. It is also the season when all the new students are back in town and I can begin my process of recruiting some new subjects. I need to get back into my studio again and begin shooting. It feels like I have been distracted the past month or so getting ready and going on the trip that I have not had much time to work on my imagery. I spent most of my spare time throughout the weekend pulling things together for the upcoming new website. It is progressing very well and we should begin putting it up on the server the next couple of days and then begin refining it. I am hoping to have something running by the end of next week, well at least the initial home pages and some of the galleries.

I still have so many images to work through that have piled up. It feels like I start a series and never quite get through it and then never quite get back to it. I have still only worked half way through the images of the trip to Europe and the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo images I took before I left. So I am really going to try to focus on getting caught up today. I have had a few jobs that I needed to complete last week that put me in delay on my personal stuff. I want to work on my yard now that it has cooled outside, but could not even seem to find time for that. The rest of this week I will be slammed but next week it will all begin to open up and I will get back to my fall creative work.

Autumns for me are the times that I accomplish my greatest nude image projects. Everything else begins to slow down as I put the gardens to bed and tie up loose ends from the summer. Glenn typically goes to North Dakota for several months to work on a soil-sampling project and I can totally get into sync with my own rhythm and work at a pace completely uninterrupted. I can work late into the night and often get up early to catch the morning light. Though with this blog project it does seem to eat a good chunk of my day. But there is something about the fall that I feel most focused. I somehow feel this one is going to become on of my most extraordinary ones ever. After beginning this project I felt I have a genuine focus this fall. There are now goals to accomplish and a standard to rise up and create. In a sense I feel like this year of my life has begun to go backwards. It’s like that movie where the guy reverses in aging. I am excited to my core again about who and where I am. It seems the age issues that I have been dealing with have somehow vanished and my life has taken on a greater purpose that is beyond myself.

Double Edged Sword

Today I begin to move into the last phase of this project. Hard to believe I am two thirds of the way through it. Wow what an adventure it is becoming and it’s amazing where it’s been in such a short time. My focus today and probably this upcoming week is on creating a website; but I am having great difficulties trying to figure out where and how it needs to go. I have been looking for templates but am not finding anything I really like that I fit into and I have been working with Adobe’s Dreamweaver to see how I am able to modify or create my own, but that is proving to be difficult as well. I have decided to call in an expert who can help me figure it out. So this afternoon’s about meetings to get started and see what I can come up with.

Actually my brain is completely fried and I am having a hard time focusing at the moment.

My head is spinning with so many ideas and possibilities but the truth of the matter is do I have access to what I need living and being here in Montana to make it happen? It seems simple enough right! But Montana is still a place where people are reluctant to expose themselves, especially for art, and though I have been fortunate to photograph them in the past, it is always a major scramble to meet and photograph someone new. I have already created a body of work but it remains stagnant if I am not able to continue the exploration and grow in the process. I cannot spend the time I need seeking new explorations if I am so wrapped up in trying to figure out the business and marketing end of this process. I feel like I am being cut by a double edge sword of where to best use my resources. Now that I am beginning to meet people who can and are willing to help me move to a new level I am faced with the question: Can I do what is necessary to make it happen and still maintain the work? Or do I continue the work and slowly allow things to evolve along the process and possibly lose some of those connections that are willing to help now? I can see where I could very easily become lost somewhere along the way. I know it’s not going to all happen at once and I really don’t expect it to. It seems the creation of art itself is the easy part, but making something of it becomes the complicated part. I keep reminding myself to take a deep breath and take it one step at a time. Perhaps I am allowing people to influence me far too much. It seems since I have been home, this is all becoming so complex, it’s almost like I can taste the dream, but can I really get there and remain true to what I started? I am beginning to wonder if moving to the next level is where I really want to be. Today it’s just overwhelming.

The Necessity To Consolidate

It’s time now to make the leap and begin working toward exposing my work on a broader market. I have been having many dialogues with several people over the past weeks and since my return trying to come up with a plan or outline on how to best orchestrate what I want to accomplish. First and foremost I realize I must begin to consolidate all of my work to one place, where people can come and find everything about this project and me. One of the main issues I am currently dealing with is that I have two separate identities. One is me as a portrait photographer under my company name of Cyr Photo LLC doing wedding, family, senior portrait, headshots and Arts and Entertainment. This part of the photography business over the past couple of years has been declining, with the saturation of too many do it your selfers and the wannabe photographers eating away at the market. The second part is creating these nude art type images more out of experimentation and exploration of this Naked Man Project. The two cannot merge and must remain separate for me being in Montana. I have sort of taken this year off from my from my regular photo business to focus on getting this project underway and seeing if I can make some sort of business out of it. So far it has been a lot of fun and I feel I am growing as an artist, but I am beginning to realize that it’s going to take a lot of time at self-promotion to get where I need to be. As much as I have worked to make it happen, I have not seen any revenue from the nude side, and still have to rely on other work to stay afloat. So I am to the point where I need to begin promoting and working toward both sides. Therefore I have to create two distinctive different promotional approaches and formats and am having a hard time right now figuring out what the priority should be. I can see the art photography gaining momentum and have begun dialogue to begin finding that focus and if I begin to pull back any, all I have worked toward can very quickly disappear. I now realize they are both something that I must put into the mix of my daily juggle.

Priority on the Naked Man front is to begin to bring it all together as a central entity. I am now spending every extra moment toward creating a site that can contain and showcase these works. I plan to spend most of the rest of this week and weekend putting things together. I have a rough draft of the new format and now just to refine it.

One of the things that have surprised me over this past year is how well I have actually been able to pull together promotional stuff for myself. Creating profiles on all my Facebook accounts, Red Bubble, proposal for the Kickstarter program, and the creation of this blog. The target is becoming clearer and more defined with each round and it is just now a time to centralize and build upon it. I have the tools and skills all in place it’s now just a matter of putting the time into making it happen. Do I really need to sleep?

Memory Of The Senses

I am still a bit completely out of whack and trying to get myself back on track. Taking a couple of weeks away from the studio and other work seems to have just put me a bit behind in some areas and this week is mostly about getting caught back up. It still amazes me how much I manage to accomplish within the course of the day. I spend about three hours gardening in the mornings, then photography all afternoon, sometimes squeezing a little nap in before heading off to spend my five hours at UPS in the evenings. Everything seems to be part time in my life and I have been a good one for juggling all this. The gardens seem to be one of the places of my greatest joy. After seeing such extraordinary gardens in Paris, I am totally inspired with some new ideas. I really see, what an extraordinary design I have put forth in some on my own spaces. A garden is like a living sculpture that is constantly evolving and changing. Something new blooms every day. Fortunately here in Montana we actually have winters and so you really see the evolution of the entire garden process with each distinctive season. Yet it allows my winters the freedom to focus back on creative photographic projects. The gardens become my time and space to reflect on myself, dream and plan. It’s my daily breath of fresh air and becomes a renewal of my spirit.

I do not mean to come across with mostly negative intent in doing this Naked Man Project. I particularly feel quite healthy and balanced and after this past trip. I am definitely coming to a greater understanding of who I am currently and where I have been and yes there are issues that I am still dealing with. When I reflect on the past, it is that a reflection, and a sort of remembrance, as was yesterday’s post. I believe the past is the key to what makes us what we have become today and that everything we learned springs from our wealth of experience. But I think there are great lessons and insight to be gained by understanding the history of who we are. Part of my mission with this Naked Man Project was to give a true reflection of my time and history as I have lived it. To be a young man, growing up on a cattle ranch in the mountains of Montana, who turns out to be gay and creative is remarkable feat in and of it self. And yes there have been major pitfalls and obstacles to over come to get to this place where I exist currently. This is my experience! I have given myself one year to explore this identity and somehow come to some understanding of where I currently stand, but part of the fact remains that it is still a chronicle of a man becoming a product of his time, living in an era of the greatest changes of the gay movement which has been extraordinary the past 30 years in it’s evolution. And yes I see what an extraordinary part of it I have become and continue to be. It is my objective in my imagery to redefine the way we look at our selves in the sexual/sensual self. To see the body and it’s soul in a positive light. We tend to live in a world of exploitation, where the self-image is completely compromised, and so much of our culture has such an unhealthy outlook on who we are. I know this because these are the issues I have spent my own life dealing with, first hand. But we cannot ignore, nor should we forget, the history from which this all springs. I now see how the Naked Man really is the exposure of myself and the discovery of identity, and the way I have viewed this change. I will and want to delve into that past to take you there first hand.

In a sense the project become three fold. While it exposed the past, it still is a growing and learning of my own self and gaining perspective and ultimately the birth and creation of my self-expression. When I first took up photography, I was enamored by the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. In many ways I saw him as a pioneer who was able to unabashedly expose his private world for others to see. He very shockingly showed a mirror unto ourselves and to the world, what we as a culture were too afraid to examine. That time was ripe and he became the product of his time. I remember how squeamish yet enthralling it was to examine his work for the first time when I discovered his books, many years after his death. This was what brought me to taking of a camera and focusing it on my own existence. Please bear with me in the upcoming months as I explore that past and come to terms with my own history. In a sense this is like tending my gardens where the sense memory is re-ignited with a certain touch, a smell, or the color of a flower that connects me to places in my memory. These thoughts reoccur each year, at the same time, in the same place, in the same manner, and are vividly relived each time. I have been doing it for so long, it’s as if the plants and trees that surround me now contain the memory of my life.