Category Archives: Photograpic Process

Dealing with the process of the photographic process

Idealistic Explosion of Talents

It’s like suddenly The Naked Man Project is kicking into overdrive and I am in heaven. Everyone in Europe and patrons I have been meeting through my social networks had all advised me that I needed to create a presence for myself, to begin to define and refine what it is I want to do. This is the most essential step of my process before anything else can happen and before I make the next step. In less than one month that presence is beginning to emerge and I am seeing a remarkable wonder and extraordinary beauty I have not recognized in myself in a long time. And yes I did get outside yesterday and worked in my garden for a couple of hours; as I transplanted delphinium and cleaned beds, suddenly, all that I have been doing came into sharp focus.

Now that Stephen has done all the housekeeping on most of the image files, I have begun working through each shoot, subject by subject. Wow, what an incredible group of people I had the privilege to work with and explore my creative process with over the years. And they are all here, from Montana. I am now skimming the cream of the crop of each series and extraordinary things are beginning to reveal themselves. I now am beginning to see more what others have been saying about the images for some time. I am often reluctant sometimes and find compliments hard to receive. It’s part of my backstage personality of those years in the theater where I remained hidden, but was the controlling force that kept the show and companies running each night. I tend to also be a fairly humble guy, who believes in keeping everything low key and simple, not the case anymore. This is becoming one of the greatest adventures of my life, every day now is filled with excitement, joy and wonder. My time in the garden yesterday also taught me that this does not have to happen at breakneck speed and to actually savor and enjoy the process as it unfolds. I am so jacked for when I will get to reveal this creation, but know I do not want to rush it or get sloppy.

I met with a new intern yesterday that I am actually jacked about having him join us. His name is Stopher, another gay kid that is funny, witty, smart and cute. He is going to take on the blog element of the site. We have found a module that will import this existing blog into the new site without much loss, and minimal adjustment. The new blog will become easier to archive and search for things. It still amazes me how massive my thoughts have exploded into this format. To be honest I thought we were going to have to start over, or somehow painstakingly transfer it one posting at a time, so I am much relieved to know it will be quite simple.

The Naked Man Project is now becoming a team collaboration of local talents and distant advisors. It feels much like creating a show in the theater where all of us function at our most brilliant capacity and are having a blast pulling it together. We challenge and push ourselves each day to see such huge progress. A show in the theater takes months of planning, preparation, rehearsal and tech before the curtain rises. I need to remind myself each day of this process and take a deep breath as I step into the beauty of this extraordinary work I have created, with which I have now surrounded myself.

Organizational Essentials

It feels like Montana is heading into fall already. The nights are getting very cold, though we have not had a major frost yet. This is typically my favorite time of the year, when I actually get out and begin cleaning my gardens out for the season, but this year I feel like I have become oblivious to what’s happening in my outside environment. This morning as the sun is streaming through the studio windows I realize what a shut-in I have become this fall. My focus and energy has completely shifted to The Naked Man Project, 24/7. In many ways I have become obsessive about it. The website is completely taking shape and the overall structure is set. Stephen and I are working through the massive naked catalogues I have amassed over the past 14 years since I took up photography and doing a massive sweep of housekeeping elements I should have established early, but never quite kept up on. I did it for my photography business, but never really for the nude portfolios. The catalog is so massive that we needed to begin copywriting, rating, sorting and key wording all the images so it becomes searchable and manageable. The galleries are built in the website, now we just need to import the images into those galleries. To do a web site of this nature I really cannot just turn it over to someone else and have them build it, because it is my personal connection to each of these shoots and collection of images that will make the project and site interesting. So it really needs to maintain the integrity and vision of what I conceived from the beginning. And the way the Joomla platform, on which the site will operate has already been designed, so the look and feel have already been established; now the content just needs to be inserted, most of the content, here of course, being the images. Stephen is becoming very good at recognizing what I see and am looking for in my own style, but he is still not quite up to speed, so the final selection and elimination needs to remain mine. I had no idea I had such a massive collection of images. One of the reasons I have neglected this kind of housekeeping on my collections was, I never really intended them to be used for anything. So my lesson and advice to artist is to come up with a filing system that you can grow into. Take the time after a shoot, once you have created the images to do some housekeeping on them, make it a part of your workflow, even if you never intend to use the images. Believe me it has taken me years to figure out a filing system that makes for easy access. I use the Adobe Lightroom Program because it has so much depth to the possibility and it one of the most powerful cataloging software programs available.

But most important I am going to take a couple of hours this afternoon and get out into my garden and rut around in the dirt and feel the cool earth in my hands and get back to an essential part of myself I have been missing: my connection to Montana in the fall.

At the Core of a Creative Existence

I watched an interesting movie yesterday while I was moping about, called Séraphine. It was a French movie about an average woman, leading a life of hardships, doing whatever jobs possible in 1927 France and who had a passion for painting. She thought she was given a blessing by god that pushed her to follow her gifts. She did not really understand why or where the divine inspiration actually came from, but was compelled to paint at whatever the cost. She was a middle-aged woman, older than myself, living in a place and time of poverty. Yet she found the greatest joy in nature and collected items from her environment to temper and color her paint, blood from a cow liver, mud from a creek, flowering plants by the roadside. She brought these elements into her small one room living space and spent the nights grinding these items into her paints, then created amazing images of that nature in vivid almost childlike impressions. The woman who played Séraphine Louis (Yolande Moreau) was mesmerizing at bringing such honesty and truth to the character. In the end she is discovered as an old lady. The success drove her mad, and she spends her last 10 years in an asylum, disconnected from nature and painting as her imagery becomes legendary.

I saw so many parallels between Séraphine and myself. For many years I have worked in a world of seclusion, being compelled to create something that I never quite understood. I have worked many jobs, just trying to make a living in order to survive. I know my desire is for the naked male, it is my divine inspiration. My connection to my own desires is so strong it often becomes intoxicating. Yes, I know gay men are supposed to become obsessed by sex and the flesh, but somehow it’s not the sex that I am drawn to, it the emotional feelings and what is stirred within those moments before or after sex that I am most fascinated with. It almost seems, to physically touch someone dispels the allure and the touch often leads where I have been so many times before, becoming lost or blinded by its emotional entanglement. I caress my subjects not with my hands, but with the light. I adore their beauty, idolize their skin for its soft silky textures and the way the light glistens on the nape of their neck. Sex is actually the furthest thing from my mind when I am shooting. Sure there are those moments when I become aroused by the process, and it is those moments when I know my images will gain their greatest potency, because I am truly in touch with the erotic core of my process. As Séraphine brought her connection to nature into her vision, I bring that world of sensuality and seduction I have known and longed for into my vision. I realize now it has been the core of my life. I am romantic at heart, I have always been romantic. I spend my nights grinding all the elements of my existence into the tools of my pallet. I have yet to make any money on this process and live my life on the edge of finical struggle. I have the skills, talents and tools to create something that is more viable and commercial, but then it’s really not my vision anymore and becomes something created for others. Though my style and approaches have changed, I am still true to myself and it still remains the journey into myself. I do fear the influence success could have on what I do and I think in many ways it sort of holds me in this place struggling to survive. I am the most content when I am creating. Though my focus is shifting toward self promotion, I still can step back into my world of beautiful light and find the security of those remarkable highly intimate moments with my subjects when the ordinary is allowed to become extraordinary.

Requiem of a Dream

I began to realize yesterday what a dream life I have. I am creating and living in a fantasy world that many people only dare dream to enter. Though some of the imagery may not always be that interesting, it is the process of creating it and the connection to the subjects that is really the fascinating part of this type of work. Since my regular work schedule has now shifted from mid afternoon to early evening, I am having to shift my shooting schedule to later evenings. There is something about shooting in a dark studio that becomes seductive and alluring. I mostly use a strobe system that over powers all light so it does not matter if I am shooting in a studio filled with daylight or at night only using the modeling lights from the strobes. I know the effect and how the light works so well, that I can perfect it without even seeing the actual results on the subject. But at night when the subjects are surrounded by darkness and they can only see themselves in the mirror across the room in the beautiful light I have bathed them in, something magical begins to emerge from their personalities as their inhibitions begin to drop. I tend to choose music that many people do not know, that has a hypnotic quality to it that allows the subjects to become lost and delve deeper within themselves. When the subject looks away and becomes unaware of my presence in the space and lets go of themselves these become moments I really look to capture.

Last night I was working with a 24 year old guy on the subject of alluring glances. That moment when you are in a dark, possibly a crowded space, and see someone across the room you desire, how you target your entire being into pulling them in and seducing them with a look. Once they connect, the hunt is on and the more powerful that seduction intensifies, through our eyes and body. At first I found it difficult to relate this concept to a 24 year old, because it’s not the way the younger generation connects anymore, but it was of my generation. But he soon got where I was trying to get and his alluring nature became intoxicating. The balance of light, the beautiful rugged texture of his clothing made me long to reach out and touch him, to hold him, to desire him, to pull him closer to me, and to enter his world physically, emotionally and mentally. It is this moment where the reality blurs into a sort of dream state, where all our senses become heightened and that passion of desire begin to reveal itself. When the photographer and subject can connect to each other on this level the imagery becomes very powerful, even to the unknown subjects who will eventually view these images. These are the moments I have always longed for and found most captivating within my own life. These are the moments I was most keenly aware of how powerful my presence and seduction was to others. It was a moment where the magnetism drew us closer, strangers in a dark lust, disrobing each other with our eyes, risking everything to expose our souls to someone else. Sometimes we have the courage to pursue it and cross the room to make that connection, but more often than not we don’t because we are inhibited by our insecurities. But the moment of that first glance, more often when we don’t connect with them in those sorts of situations, is what leaves an impression that sometimes can linger in our thoughts for a lifetime. I am at my prime when I reach this moment of memory in my photography when I can commit it to my imagery and that dream becomes a reality to someone else viewing.

When I met Glenn, 14 years ago, in this same sort of situation, and we were both young men, I remember vividly this is what pulled us together. That first kiss in the middle of a crowded room was breathless and the world around us stopped. It’s was that moment in West Side Story where Tony and Maria, who shouldn’t be together, do come together and the magic glow of a dream defying all odds begins. Unfortunately, that one ended in tragedy, but the beauty of that moment lingers forever and it’s what we remember most about the story and become haunted by, in the histories of our own memories.