I have a black old mangy three-legged cat that hobbles through my back yard each day looking for scraps. When I try to befriend it, in the garden, it runs away, afraid of human interaction. I don’t know where it lives or even where it comes from, but every time I see it I feel a strong connection to it.
I have two other cats that I have taken in as strays and nursed back to health. They almost look identical, mostly black with white beards from their mouths to their bellies. Kitty came first, when we were doing the construction of the studio, she was constantly at the site, climbing on everything. She is deaf and we never named her because it seemed pointless giving her a name if she could not recognize it. The fact that she can’t hear has some how gives her a boisterous voice that can become annoying when you are trying to sleep. She was a thin, boney thing with droopy eyes and the studio has now become her domain. Bob came by about a year later; he is named such for his missing tail, and walks oddly because of it. He is mute, and when he tries to speak, only a pathetic thin squeak emits from his mouth. He has recently been diagnosed with asthma and we have three options: we can either put him on steroids which will completely alter his personality or get him a kitty inhaler that is outrageously expensive, or allow him to live naturally with his lungs becoming restricted and eventually suffocating. He too came to us emaciated wearing a purple collar that was ratted around his neck and big curious eyes that made him look like he had just come from a circus. Glenn walks them each night through the neighborhood, allowing them and us to explore their worlds, which they enjoy immensely, and now seem to demand, when it gets dark.
I digress and what I was trying to get to was that I have always had a thing for strays. When I was bartender at a hot gay club in Washington DC, in the late eighties, after work on my way home I would often pick up the young male hustlers and take them home. Not for sex, but random acts of kindness often washing their cloths, letting them shower, and feeding them. They somehow always seemed to remind me of my home in Montana and these little acts of kindness went a long way and I was always rewarded, by the dropping of their street attitude as they allowed me into their private personal worlds. They would tell me the stories of their plight leading them to this point in their existence. It was a world I understood and identified with, the desperation and destitute they often felt. Several years earlier when I was in Dallas, at the end of my first relationship, without a job, I too had relied on the kindness of strangers for my own survival, so to speak, so could relate to them and many of them were from places like Montana. My friends where horrified that I would allow these strangers into the house, dismissing them as the underbelly of the world. Then again, it’s part of my Montana nature to be compassionate and look out for others.
I think it is one of the greatest skills I possess is my ability to communicate with anyone. I see in the work I create that experience and exposure allows me very easily to cut to the core and strip away all the grime with which most people surround themselves. This is the true nature of what I do and why I got into photography in the first place. I sometimes forget this and it feels lately have gotten so far from in my process. I am beginning to line subjects up to begin shooting in the next couple of weeks. I now see this is the core of what I need to get back to in my work. All of this talk of creating shows or exposing my work to a broader audience has distracted me, as I recognize I have grown a bit distant from my process. As I am beginning to build this web site I see this is the real essence of what I do and have been doing all along. I think many people in Montana now fear me for my bold and honest approach. As it feels it’s becoming harder to find those subjects willing to reveal themselves.
OK here we go: a leap of faith. I am finding t I am wanting to retreat into my sorted world of insecurities, which I must admit can consume me. But now is the time to really begin my focus on beauty and art and that’s what this project is really about. I am deeply romantic at my core; it’s one of the things that really excites me about who I am. I don’t really care to change the world, and for the most part am very withdrawn from it. I love soft light and constantly strive to work with it in my imagery. In fact my entire studio is completely wired on a series of dimmers so that I can have control of creating the perfect environment for whatever mood I am in. Music is an integral part of that romantic allure. I love music; all kinds of music and often becomes part of the design. For me this is what the photograph becomes about, setting up the environment for a tone, a feeling, an emotions and creating that entire state of existence. It becomes intoxicating, entrancing, and often time very hypnotic. It allows me to bond with the subject so we can go on a highly personal journeys together, to get to the core of what I am feeling, and explore our identities.
Wrath of the techno gods!!!! For some reason I have been in technology limbo for the past couple of days. Sunday as I was beginning this blog and uploading the first entry onto the internet my laptop, that I do all my writing, research, and finances on suddenly crashed. I just barely got the text up when bam! The laptop, a Mac Book Pro that I have had for 8 years, which has been my constant companion, has now been in the shop for the past 24 hours awaiting the final verdict. And yesterday I finally received the call from Computer ER to inform me the disc drive was non functioning and the data on it not recoverable. OK so when was the last time I backed the damn thing up…January of last year! My fault! You would think a man who deals with technology for a living should know better! My main work computer I use to do all my image filing and processing on is backed up, by three different sources, in three different locations. One on a 2nd built in hard drive on the same computer, one in the loft on the other side of the studio, and one an external hard drive I can remove and take off site that I keep in a fire safe. So I am not totally a bonehead when it comes to this technology. But this has totally put a damper in my workflow the past couple of days. I feel like I have lost a dear friend who knows all my deepest secrets.
One of my passions is shooting classic art. A perfect day to me is going to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and shooting the classic Greek and Roman statuary. You may think this sounds kind of static, well it isn’t! You begin to develop a relationship with an inanimate piece of stone. This statue of Ugolino and His Sons by the French sculptor Jean-Baptise Careaux captivated me. At the time I probably spent a good hour trying to capture and understand my relationship between it and my own imagery. Today Ugolino’s expression, waiting in Dante’s ninth circle of hell, captures the essence of my own angst and feeling of my techno blundering and points a middle finger toward the gods who dare to impede or deny my creative quest.
When I was first getting into photography and still shooting on film, I had a young gay man come into my studio whom I wanted to shoot nude. He was very excited by the prospect of seeing what we could create together. His only stipulation was that he did not want any pictures where he would be naked and show his face in the same image. He was okay with doing nude torso images from the neck down or face pictures from the waist up. I agreed and said I would work within those parameters. Hey, I had a live model who was willing to strip down and allow me to light and explore him naked through my photographic process.
