I had to take the site down for a couple of days as we begin to deal with some maintenance issues that have begun to arise. The original server where I began the site was an independent server that contained several other sites. The last couple of months, as my site has gown, it’s now larger than what the original server can handle and at the rate of speed it’s growing would soon cause damage to the original server. It’s not the volume of he content but the volume of traffic flow and it can no longer handle the bandwidth of so much traffic. We felt the need to move and upgrade the project to a bigger server. In actuality this is a good problem to have. The numbers of hits and flow of traffic through the site are staggering; I had no idea that the site would be come this popular. As the amount of unique visitors grows to thousands each month (return visitors) this indicates that site is a huge success. About 75 percent of the people visiting the site keep returning. The site now gets 90,000 page views with about 300,000 hits per month.

The last couple of days as we have been trying to migrate the site to the new server we have encountered some issues with ghosting between the servers and we are in the process of cleaning up some problems that created broken links for images and galleries. There are still many of the links from the blog into the website that will still be broken. You can still navigate the blog and the index I have created of the entire year-long blog project is functional. But any links to images may not work. I am sorry for the inconvenience and we should have everything back to normal in the next couple of days.

This is a good problem to have since what began as a simple blog communication between other artist friends working in the subject of nude male art and grown to a larger audience of appreciation.

Thank you for your patience and support on the project.

Terry

I have been doing an in depth research project on the painter known as Caravaggio lately. Trying to research his life and who the mysterious man might have been. He was not overly popular that the time he was painting and many of his images were rejected because he chose to use prostitutes and common people as the models for his religious works of saints. But he was one of the first to bring a certain reality into his paintings. He insisted on using live models as his subjects, trying to realistically create the setting from which he would paint, without any kind of preliminary sketching or studies. Baskets of fruit actually showed the mildew and decay far from perfection or the idealism that the contemporaries of his time created. They were studies of real life. He did tend to use a heightened and very theatrical lighting technique for his subjects. This too was also real, usually based on an actual light source, a window, a candle, or a lamp. So the fall of the light on the subjects realistically going to actual darkness. Many of his images are about light emerging from darkness. Very theatrical. The realism of his subjects expressions give them inner life and a depth that becomes absorbing for most viewers.

He was a man obsessed with his art and the realism of capturing the essence of the human spirit in his imagery. There is great speculation on his sexuality, especially leaning toward a bisexual tendency. He never married and used many of his male friends as the models of his paintings, especially the early ones. His work did not become popular until there was a seemingly obsessive resurgence of this work in the mid twentieth century. Though the images were never signed, except one, his style was highly recognizable and become an inspiration for generations of painters who followed. His life seemed to be in constant turmoil and the later part he spent fleeing for his life as he was convicted and sentenced to death for accidentally killing another man he meant to only wound in the groin area but severed his femoral artery and he bled to death. Many of his late images depict decapitation, which he became obsessed with since it was the means of execution at the time, his own head becoming the likeness of many of those paintings. He eventually died a poor man with nothing as his work and notoriety disappeared.

I do not try to compare myself to Caravaggio, but his work and imagery have a strong influence on my style. Having worked in theater as a lighting designer I am captivated by his use of light or probably more importantly his lack of the use of light. Much of his images are in darkness. But where the light comes across that what it reveals is brilliant. I am now spending a great deal of time working within my own studio trying to create some of the light from his painting. Though I have an arsenal of light filtration tools at my disposal, the balance becomes quite difficult. I have a tendency to want to fill the shadows too much with some sort of light to bring out more details, fearing the images will become too uninteresting with so much darkness. Of course every artist must find his own means of expression and what feels right, so the exercises merely become a jumping off point. It is not only about the light, but also more about the psychology of the subject. I look for subjects who bring a natural realism to the studio when we work. This way we are able to get at the core naturalism I have always admired. After all, art is really an expression of ourselves and how we relate to our own universe. There is something in the darkness of Caravaggio that ignites a passion deep within me that I relate to from my core. Perhaps it is my own turmoil that I see in others reflected back into myself. Much of the doubt I struggled with last year creating the blog project has brought a new light to myself. I am far more comfortable and confident then I was last year. It is now interesting to see it begin to emerge in the now explorations of my current work.

It feels like I have fallen under a strange curse with my project and what I want to achieve with it.  I am having great difficulty recruiting subjects to work with.  I have been working like crazy to network and tried many different approaches but, now that people know and see what I am doing, everyone seems intimidated by it and no one is interested in working with me.  Most everyone I approach says, “I do not look like that!”   I am not in that good of shape, and I think there is an overwhelming fear that everything I do will end up on the web site.  This is utterly far from the truth on both accounts.  Most of the people I work with are not really in great shape and where I began with the project so long ago was on a exploration of who people were, at what ever condition they were, just getting to the core of what is their sensual best: an exploration of their own identity into themselves.  It’s more a process of discovery of who they are.  But it seems that what started out as a process of discovery has become a tangible object in the form of an image or art form.  I think I was better off less known and undiscovered.  The problem isn’t that I can’t connect to them because I am connecting to many.  Most everyone has either seen or heard of my work or me, but there now seems to be a fear of what I create.  It’s very odd and I can’t quite isolate the root of its cause.  Once people have met me and worked with me, it seems we become great friends and I am able to work with them over and over again.  As far as posting images of my subjects, I do get their consent before anything is posted and have removed a couple of subjects from the site who originally consented and signed model releases allowing my to publish their images.  When they thought my work with getting too popular and reputation growing beyond their comfort level where they might become recognizable.  Again this becomes the curse of success.  I am running out of approaches and not sure how to find new subjects.

In the mean time I have been building the website, working on past images I have shot, and networking with other artists around the world.  It seems my plight is common to many other artists, no mater where they live.  We all struggle with finding subjects who are willing to work.

Not all of my images are nude or completely naked.  It is not a requirement to work with me.  Subjects take it where they are most comfortable.

Lately some of my focus has been changing. I have been working on all the things I had neglected from last year. I am finally working through many of the personal images I took last year and creating galleries for them. I am trying to begin to put some of those galleries on my Facebook profile to share them with others who have been wondering what I have been up to in my personal life. Yes, there is another side to myself and my work other then nude males. I am actually a photographer of many things and interested in a great deal of subjects. I recently posted the images from my trip last summer to Paris, the HOTEL FENLIN film project I was working on a few weeks back, as well as other work I loved from last year. I have a Facebook page for this Naked Man Project, which is restricted to adults and a Facebook page of my photography as a business of Terry J Cyr Photography that is open to general public. But my personal Facebook page is my own, more about me. I have been trying to build all aspects of who I am, but there are many boundaries that are becoming quite complex and are becoming difficult to draw distinctive lines between. Yesterday I received a note from someone, who is open minded and accepting about what I do, suggest that I tighten the restriction on my Facebook page because stuff I was posting seemed too mature for younger kids that may be on their parent’s Facebook pages. My immediate reaction was to delete the feed or link, which I did. This morning I got up and began to research Facebook for possible security restrictions and realized there really isn’t much in place for under aged individuals. Not that something like this would work if under aged children are on parent’s accounts that have friended me. My next reaction was to unfriend all the people I knew who had young children, and suddenly I began to realize I had fallen into a madness of self-censorship. I felt an anger beginning to grow within me; suddenly I could no longer be who I was or be accepted for what I was doing.

Most everyone who knows me knows that I am obsessed with art and the creative process. It is my life and always has been. This past month I have softened the website a bit hiding questionable materials to a logon-only sort of basis and I guess in a sense I am beginning to feel that perhaps it’s not really my responsibility to censor myself. If what I do becomes an issue for people with children on the internet, perhaps they are the ones that should unfriend me instead or censor what their children are looking at on the internet. I am who I am and have always been an artist who expresses my passion. We now have one of the most powerful tools available to humanity that allows us to network and connect with other like-minded people around the world. I choose to use this tool to my advantage, to grow and converse with other artists from everywhere, share ideas, feelings, concepts, far beyond the chit-chat most use it to pour out there every day experience. This is my everyday experience! I post what I’m passionate about and things that have somehow moved me and I want to share with others who I think might have a similar experience with the same materials. The “306” SHORT GAY FILM” video I posted to my website yesterday, has a powerful message of hidden identity, though some of it is graphic, is filled with emotion captures the duality of what many of us feel. I do not want to have to compartmentalize who I am or restrict what I feel. After all this is a global experience for all to share.