Category Archives: Art of Photography

themes on the photographic process

I Can Always Sell Matches

Wow it is mid afternoon and I feel like I have been sucked into the world of cyber reality as I am trying to figure out how to put together yet another piece of this mysterious website. My topic of search today has been: “How can I actually protect the images I put on the Internet?” I have completely come up blank. There are no real solutions actually available out there that can or will work. It seem that it mostly comes down to choice of completely marking the images up with some sort of watermark that will completely cover or obstruct the nature of the work or just putting the images out there for free access. I am not over comfortable with either. The nature of artist is free expression of the art or images without obstruction. I would like to be able to market myself somehow, but if most everything is just for free on the Internet then we end up working for nothing and it completely loses it value. What a strange time we live in where modern media is so limitless and expendable. I feel like I am living in a world of constant frustration that I can’t seem to make work and that the only options are a loss on either end. I wish somehow I just had a limitless wealth so that I could just be creative and not have to worry about the possibilities. Am I just two or three steps behind the technological world where I live? It feels most of life has been lived in a world of dying art forms. I was passionate about theater, but in a sense as I entered that world it too was coming to a close. Overall, the next generation is not really interested in such art forms and it seem that fewer and fewer young people are going to such events. Broadway still seems alive and thriving, but the ticket prices have become so hefty that many can no longer attend a show or will save up for one or two during the course of a venture into NYC. There was a time when I would fill every possible slot with a show when I was in the city, often two a day seeing 16 shows within a two-week visit.

Then I moved into the world of my second passion; photography. I believe the downfall of this medium is has been the advent of instant capture, instant see era. Everyone with a cell phone becomes a photographer and it’s instantly on line. I have seen the images from the new I-phones and I have to say they are utterly awesome. You no longer need any kind of training or experience to get really great results and people around the world are able to share your expression within moments. Perhaps this project becomes for naught, and is just a cry in the darkness of its fading history? I guess I am still having a blast in the creative process though most of the time I have no idea where I am heading. I still love theater and the experience of live interaction. I still love photography for the experience of live interaction and the beautiful essence of what lingers in its wake. Perhaps I should just remain in the garden because of my live interaction with nature, but then again it’s also heading to its season of dormancy. What is a girl to do????? One of my favorite scenes in a movie is from Victor/Victoria, where Julie Andrews dress has shrunk from the rain, and it’s the middle of the night, she is at wits end and begins to sob, “What am I going to do?” Robert Preston replies, “Sell matches!” But then again I live in a world of eternal flame and smoking seems to be on the decline.

Elements Of Design

It’s so beautiful out already this morning; the leaves on my giant willow trees in the back yard are beginning to yellow and slowly falling creating a carpet of yellow along the ditch banks. I see the skies begin to clear with some patches of blue. If the sun comes out it’s going to create a brilliant glow that will radiate through out the house. This would be a perfect morning for some beautiful photographs, but I have no one lined up. Thor and I a have been putting so much time into the website that I we have neglected shooting anything new in the past couple of weeks. I am writing early today, even before coffee, because I want to get out and work on the yard today. I have the new deer fence about half way done on the other side of the house, so today’s goal is to get out and finish the fence and start thinking about how to design a gate. For those of you who know me, you know I don’t do anything simple and every element of my life is personally designed.

For those who have been to the studio you know exactly what I mean. The whole house is completely off center, with so many angles and pitches and textures. Everything is about function and has been created for a specific purpose. The pitch in the main room, where I shoot, was set up so that I would have beautiful natural light that would face to the north at a specific angle exposing the sky without ever allowing direct light into the actual room. With the vaulted ceilings, needing the height for lighting equipment to be raised on stands and booms, the whole pitch of the room had to be offset to thirds. See the rule of thirds I use for photography even plays into my design of the house. Because the pitch of the room is offset to the lesser third on the northern side, it creates that effect with the northern skylights. As I was designing the space, I hired a draftsman who could do the drawings of what I envisioned in my head. I defied his rules of logic and he kept moving the lines back to center. Then we hired a structural engineer who told us how to make it happen. The house is very unique and totally matches my personality. It has the balance and flow of a beautiful painting. I design from my heart and often defy what is logical, it becomes more about an expression of emotion and feelings the space evokes. My yard is becoming the same way. The fence is designed for the practical purpose of keeping the deer out, but allowing the small critters that inhabit the yard like my kitties a freedom and flexibility to move through it, and since one of them is deaf, a quick escape from dogs that come upon her unaware. The yard is small so it needs to have a feeling of being open and not restricted. The fence is becoming like these beautiful little trellises that I will also be able to plant and grow climbing flowering vines. And the rough-cut cedar gives it a weight and texture. This year was about creating a rough outline of the garden, next year will be about sculpting it. So since I have no models lined up for this beautiful Sunday morning I am heading out the garden to enjoy another fall day.

Maintaining the Artistic Integrity

Are you getting tired of hearing about the website yet??? It’s all I can think about anymore and seems to consume my every thought. The process is as frustrating as it is exhilarating. I am not a techno geek and am more of a goal-oriented guy so when I hit a block, become very frustrated. There are so many settings and possibilities for options that I just don’t grasp and I can waste hours on one thing that turns out to be so simple. Julian who helped us set up the system seems to have abandoned us and we are left to flounder as we learn and try to figure it out. On the other side, we are making major leaps every day. We are finally loading the galleries today and I think the overall look and functionality if very impressive.

The fun part is that I have continued shooting through out this web process and had two shoots the other day, both vastly different, which means I had to reconfigure the set up and lighting scheme for the studio. The studio just seems to become a hubbub of activity constantly now. The shooting is becoming more focused as I now have a cleaner vision of what I want and need. I have been mostly working with subjects I have worked with in the past, so it’s easier to jump right in and get going. I am still maintaining and need to keep my focus on the original integrity of where I began this process and have not deviated from that, but the images are improving with each session and subsequent shoot.

Many years ago I only dreamed of being in a place like this and now here I am in the middle of it all and things are coming together. Having the assistants is making a huge difference in how I create. It’s actually allowing me to focus on my process as they work through so much of the detail and I get to jump in and oversee it for maintaining the artistic integrity.

Don’t worry I will be back to some of my interesting stories soon, once we get this thing rolling and I can begin to focus on other things.

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.

The Dismemberment of the Peni (s)

I have spent this weekend in contact with John Douglas in Australia coming up with a plan or an idea to begin a new social network based on male nude or erotic art. He was the original founder of a site called Man Art, which is where I first began to show my images a year ago May and really what has lead me to here. Followers of the Blog will remember that Man Art was shut down last spring due to censorship issues on the server hosting it. Men on the Verge of  a Pornographic Extinction I am now working with a Webmaster who has his own server and the whole thing has become private so there should be no possibility of censorship. It seems the distinction between pornography and art is often blurred. But to the people creating it, the ability to express one’s self, those lines are quite clear. And sure sometimes we push those boundaries, but that’s what a true exploration of artistic expression is. If we did the same things all the time it would become boring and our work stagnate. As artist we need to constantly be challenging our selves and the way we examine our existence. And to have that social network in one common place where we can interact and feed each other is essential. For many years I worked in a hidden world. I knew what it was I wanted to do, but creating such art in a place like Montana was totally unacceptable and still taboo. But in all honest the naked male form is still taboo in most parts of the world. It’s funny that a man taking his cloths off in a football stadium faces sieve legal action while everywhere I wandered in Paris I saw open displays of statuary of full frontal exposed male nudity in most every public park. Unfortunately the private parts have been chiseled off some of the most remarkable pieces by various religions through out history that found that item of the male anatomy unacceptable. But gazing at the remarkable beauty of those statues where those bits still remained in tact it really doesn’t become the focus of the art. It actually has the opposite effect, because we are more drawn to what was removed. After centuries of growth and enlightenment we live in a world where people are still trying to dismember the penis. For god’s sake it’s a part of who we are, half of the world has a penis. I digress.

The one thing that is missing from the Internet is this social network of artist who can share their common idealism, unafraid. I still see people being censored on Facebook and my own account deactivate earlier this year. I dream, I dream of a place where all men are created equal, a place where we can express and explore our true identities, idealism and feelings without fear of being emasculated.