When the film Brokeback Mountain finally made it to the theater, it began a profound spiraling effect on my reconnection to my western heritage. Growing up on a cattle ranch in the mountains of western Montana and being gay always seem to create a clash somehow in my head; the two never quite somehow belonged together. Perhaps the country life, since it was so prevalent in the region, was what I feared becoming. It was almost like I was shamed by my heritage and went to great lengths to hide or deny it. I was familiar with Brokeback in its early short story format and when I heard I they were making it into a movie in our neck of the woods, I applied to become a part of it. I unfortunately didn’t get on the crew and was sadly disappointed. When I finally saw the film on the big screen, it began to change my perception of myself and who I was. There was so much depth and emotion to the characters I recognized within myself, that it was near impossible to deny any longer. I realized that if more people like myself stood up to this backward perception of gay in the west and embraced it we could show our selves in a new light. At the time it hit the movie screen I was on a national theater tour with a show called The Trip to Bountiful. As the tour progressed I began to examine my own life allowing the history of my western heritage to manifest it self physically as well as emotionally, and the cowboy within me began to emerge. In a sense it become my own trip to bountiful in coming home to what I had lost by my silly denial. I began working on a series of images “backstage” at the small town Montana rodeos that surrounded me, shooting life from the cowboy perspective. I even joined the Gay Rodeo Association and began to photograph all things to do with cowboy. I created and explored many amazing portraits of cowboys in my studio and even began to delve into what I found erotic about this lifestyle from my youthful fantasy. It was time to take what I did best and create a new mythology about the gay cowboy, to establish a new icon that would be healthy and alluring. So today’s image, the seventh in the portfolio series, is called You Can Leave You Hat On, my tribute to the western theme I have embraced within myself.

I am merely $600 away from reaching my goal on the Kickstarter The Naked Man Project: Searching for Exposure. If I can make this goal it will prove that even a small boy from western Montana is capable of being given the opportunity to follow his dream and a life long passion and break the confines of perceived discrimination and confines of rural life. For some reason this project has been buried in Kickstarter. All the new projects have somehow been featured and given prominent placement, but mine has become almost unfindable to the casual Kickstarter browser, you can only find it if you are specifically searching for it. I have also noticed that there are not many gay themed projects. Does this project contain objectionable content that still remains taboo and must remain hidden?

Today’s post is dedicated to Sam Maloney, who has grown up much like me here in Montana, and wrote me this amazing letter a while back about recognizing similar struggles. Thanks Steve so much for your support toward this project.

My next leap in photography was to digital. Up to this point, I had shot most everything on film, though I had scanned a lot of it and did some selective toning or coloring with the black and white images. I was becoming somewhat familiar with the digital tools available. Today’s image was a complete leap into the new and modern era. I knew I wanted to work on an image based on the mythology of Narcissus, and this proved a very good subject to begin my experiments. Then one rainy day I finally dragged Jared into the studio. We took the big four foot by seven foot mirror off the wall and placed it flat on the floor. I began to spew black fabric around the mirror so that the lighting hitting it would give it an undefined jagged edge, like rocks at a creek side. Jared stripped down to a loin cloth that we wrapped around his waist. He began to hover over the mirror began to light him, the whole environment becoming theatrical. We spent the entire afternoon shooting hundreds of images studying all the possibilities; different body positions, angles of his and my focus, looking at it from every conceivable perspective. In the end I had so many image to choose from that it became an agonizing process to choose the one I would work into a final image. I knew the next step would take so much time I wanted an image that captured the overall balance of frame and composition and could showcase the extraordinary light and tone of the scene.

I spent several days working on this image, building it up layer by layers in Adobe’s Photoshop. The reflection in the water is actually from the mirror, but I began to work with layers that first desaturated the color, eventually adding the ripples to really look like water. The upper layers I heightened the saturation of the color of light on his skin to really make it pop and enhance the beauty of his skin tones. All of this now would take me maybe an hour to create if that. I printed, matted and frame the image and hung in on my wall. This became one of my most popular images. I had found an interesting new world of tools that could utter help me create my vision. Why had I resisted the new technology for so long? My purest thoughts of what photography should be suddenly went out the window and I suddenly embraced the new medium and began to focus my process in a new direction.

The fifth piece in the portfolio series is called “Jared Lying.” Jared is an actor I went on a theatrical tour with and then hired to become my garden assistant for the summer. On rainy days we would go into the studio and work on some images. This particular image was right after the unexpected death of my mother. I really wanted to capture something that would delve into my own psyche of how I was feeling about her loss. Working with a model who was an actor was an amazing process because we could emotionally go to the places I wanted to explore. He would instantly tap into and project my inner thoughts and feelings. I had worked in theater for a long time as a stage manager and developed very strong skills for communication as a director, to be able to get to the core of what is actually happening in a scene. It was through this image that I finally began to work and use those skills to get at the emotional quality of my images.

One of the things I insist on doing when I begin working with someone new, is to interview them first and really try to study them and figure out where they are coming from and what we both have in common to which we can relate. It is during this interview that the barriers begin to fall and we can communicate on such an intimate level. I am always very open about my feelings and emotions and am quite interested in others experiences along those same lines. Then, once we move into the studio and I have to deal with all the technical aspects of creating the image, they are more in tune with me and the collective process of creation.

The fourth image in the series is was still a work on film called Jason Nudes #101. I had finally acquired a medium format camera that gave me a larger negative to work with. I was getting heavily involved with the gay community, becoming involved with the politics and building a stronger healthier community. Some friends and I had started a monthly publication called OutSpoken, which lasted about two years, dealing with social issues that were happening around us. I was beginning to meet all sorts of people that I didn’t even know existed in the community around me. My reputation as a photographer was beginning to grow for shooting or wanting to work in the area of beautiful black and white male nudes. Men began to approach me asking to work on images. My studio space was beginning to develop and I hired a talented scene designer to paint some interesting backgrounds. What I was learning in the community was that most of gay life in Montana kind of existed in a sort of fractured world, and this became a theme that began to emerge in the images I was creating. Now my studio hot light kit had grown to more controllable lighting using scrims to filter and control the light to enhance mood and tone. I was a huge fan of the painter Edward Hopper and have always felt a kinship the emotional disparity of the subjects of his painting. The deep shadows at the end of day casting long shadows the enhanced the inner psychology of the state of mind of the Great American Depression era from which his images sprang. I was also obsessed with pornography and the erotic power it had on my own desire. So I began to do these elaborate set ups in my studio to create a light and a quality of image that was more about my own feeling of who I was at that moment in my life and the sexual seduction of desire and the voyeuristic eroticism that could emerge from my skills as a photographer. This was part of a series and my first and only attempt at shooting pornography.

Jason had come to me and asked if I was interested in working on these types of images. I was and we began to come up with a series of shoots to explore the possibility. This is the beginning of a nine image series as we move deeper within its depths. I remember the feeling of the session becoming like a hypnotic trance; because I had to then shoot at night, the studio filled with only the beauty of this light. I kept shooting, with no point of reference because it was film. But I had become very good a lighting and exposure and had control of what I was capturing. We never submitted the images for publication and Jason moved away from Missoula shortly after the shoot and did not get to see the actually final images until I found him on Facebook some years later. This series of images becomes important to me because for the first time I felt like I had prepped and set up my studio for the shoot and just allowed my instincts press the shutter to capture the sequence. I was very erotically charged and responded to my visceral impulses, letting go of all technical aspects and connecting on a purely emotional level with my craft. It was the first time I felt myself merge with the process; the camera was now an extension of me. It’s a remarkable moment in your evolution when you reach that moment of non-separation of the psyche and the craft and it all becomes one and what is allowed to emerge in the remarkable pure moment of passion you feel within it. Every time I gaze upon this series I still feel that moment of hypnotic response, touching the sense memory of my heart racing, my breath stopping, my palms breaking into a sweat, becoming suspended in time and a place of ethereal bliss and eroticism.

I am still about $800 away from obtaining my goal on Kickstarter. Please contribute if you are inspired by my work or stories. Even little amounts help to get closer to the goal. THE NAKED MAN PROJECT: SEARCHING FOR EXPOSURE.

Sorry no naked men today, just the naked earth!!! I am having the most extraordinary week and weekend. For some reason this week draws me outdoors. I had a job early this week to photograph a mountain ranch estate that is mostly wilderness. This property is along the river and contains several lakes. The owners want to develop it, so I was hired to create images of the beauty of the location. I have not been out to do this sort of work in some time. I spend a day guided through the mostly wilderness of the property photographing it. The property was so much like our ranch property where I grew up. My heart leapt with awe to be out walking the beautiful hillsides to discover and reveal the contoured land. I kept questing, why do I not get out in this beauty that surrounds me more often? It is within moments of my grasp and I take it all for granted. I tend to get stuck in my humble studio and not venture far from it. Mostly because everything I adore is already there. It took me about half a day to work through the images once I got back to the studio and each and everyone was like a beautiful little postcard. I was filled with excitement as each one began to come to life.

Yesterday was a day of perfection. My family was having a celebration for my Uncle and Aunt’s 50th anniversary. It was an hour to the north on Flathead Lake. Glenn and I got up early and drove to an extraordinary valley called Moiese, kind of bountiful farm belt the other side of the National Bison Range. Glenn mocks how there is a restaurant at the mouth of the entrance that serve buffalo the very thing they are trying to preserve. We have some very dear friends, another gay couple who have built a remarkable place in the farmland. One is an art historian, the other a counselor here in Missoula. It was a beautiful day and I we sat out in the warm sun and spent the afternoon catching up. This place is so amazing. It mostly consists of a very large barn with a simple living space attached and some smaller hut type building for a kitchen and bedroom. The view is fantastic on all sides looking out over the rugged snow capped Mission Mountain Range to the east. I did not want to leave.

We hit the drive home at the cusp of sunset driving across the Ninepipes reserve to be captivated by the setting sun casting its beautiful glow across the mountain range.

Today I felt at home like I have never felt. I saw the extraordinary in my seemingly ordinary life. I realize how lucky I am to be a part of the heritage and how much the land means and this place touches my soul. Sometimes being from a place like this, we always look for something that is better, bigger then ourselves and we forget what is important and crucial to maintain our existence. I live in a place that most people only dream about. I am a fourth generation Montana ranch boy who finds contentment in simple pleasure in the beauty of extraordinary days like these. With my photographic images becoming a success and this upcoming adventure to another continent I wonder how my life may change. I know I am always adaptable. Sometimes the treasures of our lives are not in what we make, but in what we experience.

Today I am taking the day to go rafting with some other great friends to another extraordinary place called the Blackfoot River, just miles up stream. This is the place Norman McClain writes about in his book “A River Runs Through It”