I feel like I am becoming a bit tapped out and have talked about everything possible. Have been working on this website so much that I actually can’t seem to think or function anymore. It’s a time for a diversion! The site is coming along beautifully, but it has grown beyond what I thought it would become. With some minor set backs shutting the process down most of last week, things are back to normal again and it’s almost finished. I don’t think I have ever worked on anything as hard and long as I have this. The rain seems to have passed and the last couple of days have been totally Montana gorgeous as the leaves are now starting to change and vibrant color fills the air. The warm sun feels great after all that cold rain. I have begun my fencing project on the other side of the house so I am going to get out and work on that today. I really need to work with my body and hands, instead of so much with my brain. I am going to put on my work clothes, play some jazz music and head outside.
Category Archives: Montana
OUTSpoken
Last night I had dinner with an old friend that I have known for years. He is a young kid, originally from California who came to Montana to go to the University. He is a very successful independent business man at the age of 35 who has always been a role model and inspiration to me. About twelve years ago, when I was first getting into photography, we and a few other people started a venture together, to build a stronger gay community in our small city of Missoula. It seemed the time was ripe and I had been a part of creating a men’s focus group to identify and build a stronger healthier way to look at ourselves using federal prevention money from the Ryan White Act. Coming out of this group I saw a need for unity and to somehow obliterate the isolation and lack of communication that kept us hidden and closeted.
This small band of friends began a monthly newspaper called OUTSpoken, where we would take on a topic that we felt needed to be tackled and devote an entire issue to show the subject from many different perspectives, and of course I would have to come up with the cover photo that captured the essence of the topic. These topics ranged from gay bashing, to intimacy issues, to local politics. One of my favorite subjects was people dealing with transgender issues. It was something I didn’t know anything about and became enamored with as we interviewed others going through this process. To me it was a high point in my life. We became very connected socially with the community and began to develop a very strong network of supporters. The project seem to grow as did we and the community began to thrive, suddenly people were engaging on so many levels and the birth of the idea of a community center was spawned and eventually came into being.
We began to reminisce last night about what leaders we had become in developing and impacting our own little isolated corner of the world and how that world has changed and evolved since our endeavor. I think so many people in small towns still feel a bit trapped or isolated and I can’t tell if the internet is helping or hindering this. The skill that we lack is an ability to talk to each other, there is a confidence missing to put ourselves out there for fear of being judged or some other retribution. From what I can see the internet makes it easier to hook up, remain anonymous, without having to engage someone socially. It’s kind of like that person you sit next to on an airplane that you don’t talk to because you know it seems pointless when you are headed for different destinations and your paths may never cross again.
I began to realize last night this is one of the goals I set out at the beginning of this year and writing about my experience, because it is deeply impacting others. People can learn and grow from the lessons I have learned. This year has been one of the greatest years of my own personal growth. I now see how I have made amends with my own family issues, my identity of coming to terms with my own aging process, and finding the vitality in the life that surrounds me. Sometimes we become so caught up in our own worlds that we forget or become blinded to the relevance and significance of our own remarkable beauty. I began to year feeling hopeless and at the end of my rope and now that passion is again ignited and reborn. Wow what an awesome year I am having!
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.
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.
