I am writing this morning from a remote cabin at 57,000 on top of a mountain in Northern Idaho. Glenn had been planning this weekend for months and I said once I got the website up I would go. We took the weekend off and come over to visit our friends Forrest and Beth and their black lab Sprocket in a small mining town called Mullan, just over the mountains and the Montana-Idaho border. We then proceeded to a cabin in the mountains miles above Wallace. Their place is very rustic and I was not sure that we would even make it to the destination. The higher we went the deeper the snow got until we reached the cabin and the snow level was about a foot deep. The cabin, more a pole lodge, so far is only covered by exterior sheeting and was very raw within. It has a little wood stove in the center of the room that we instantly fired up and within a half hour could no longer see our breaths. I put a pot on the stove and made a hearty chicken stew with carrots, potatoes, and mushrooms flavored with tarragon, a pinch of basil, and rosemary. It turned out fantastic for my first time of cooking an old fashioned wood stove.
We ate, drank, and chatted and watched the world around us envelop into a secluded darkness and the one gas lantern they had seem to fail us. Then we all climbed to a loft to sleep. There was a draft of snow and ice particles blowing through the cracks, which Forrest tired to seal before we went to bed. I drifted in and out of consciousness as Forrest got up throughout the night to feed the fire. At one point that fire had gone out and I hunkered deeper into my bed, snuggling closer to Glenn for warmth as a draft that felt good when I first went to bed now chilled the core of my body. In the wilderness the night seems eternal as I kept waking up looking for some signs of daylight. The morning came early gradually illuminating the outline of the open rafters barley above my head.
I was the first one up because I wanted to watch how the light began to fill the valleys far below us. As rustic as it all seemed it really awoke a side of myself I have completely forgotten. It reminded me of my youth and growing up on the ranch. It feels like the ongoing theme of this week has been a return to simplicity and a greater connection to my natural heritage. Although the website is a culmination of my existence, it is my connection to the future as I move into the future. Today I am stripped on all the essentials of a modern life, no running water, no electricity, dependent on the life my computer laptop battery, now running in the red. Here we are against our own elements. There is something poetic about the sound of the snow smattering against the side of the building, of not working from the moment I rise to well after midnight each night. We must exist only within the expanse of the natural day.
Yesterday I began a discussion about analyzing light in a photograph to use it to your advantage. The discussion began with my looking at a book of rare vintage nudes from the 60’s. And there was a prime example of what I wanted to talk about in one of the images but I can find a decent enough image of it online to show my examples so I am going to take this image of Travis. It’s harder to do on an image that I already know and have created. To me my own lighting techniques are so simplistic that they are hard to describe but here goes. My concept for the image was to show a gritty dirty mechanic sort of guy who had been working in a shop possibly most of his life. Growing up in small towns in Montana there are guys I know well and in high school I was particularly drawn to one kid who really exited me. He was a smart kid from a poorer family and work to help supplement and support his family. I watched him struggle most of the time and often worked instead of having fun with some of the rest of us his own age. He had an alliance to duty and I felt he often felt trapped in that world longing to be out from under its burden. He always seemed to live in a very fractured world. Yet there was something sexy and sensual in his honesty and how humble his work in the garage became. Every time I would visit he would just dirty in his coveralls, grime smeared across his face. The smell of the grease and mechanic dirt somehow become intoxicating to me and I found a strong desire to somehow be closer to him and somehow ease his fractured world.
I used Travis as me subject for this study because he so much reminded me of the person I used to know. So now that you know the history of the image I want you to begin looking that the image and analyze to see if I have indeed captured the properties of my intent tough the use of light. Typically I do this with images I don’t know the story behind and try to discover the artist’s connection to the subject though their use of light and exposure. The first thing I look at is the overall feel of the image. What does it stir or evoke within myself? There is a distance yet longing with in his eyes and a power and a strength in his hands that embrace the chain the bind him around his neck with a sort of comfort while he stands back, distant, yet there is a longing in his bloodshot eyes to connect to something different. Once you have established the over all mood, you must search the image for what supports that feeling. How does the light impact the psychology of the image? How many lights did the photographer use and where were they placed. The first place to begin to look for how a photographer uses light is to look at the catch light in the subject’s eyes. If you can zoom in close it will give you a lot of detail what the shape of the light was and where it was placed. On Travis you will see I used two lights in the front one a very long narrow light with a soft filter almost straight out in front, slightly to the right. You will also see just a faint small secondary light to the left that fills in the shadows on the left side of his face. This is what captures the longing in his eyes. I then used two very strong lights one to the left, not very high to sculpt the right side and a secondary light with little filter over his left shoulder. These are slightly behind him because I wanted there to be shadows on his face that represented and fractured light coming from different angels across his face, enhancing him being pulled in different directions accentuation his own fractured world. To discover the placement of these lights you look at where the highlights hit and the shadows fall. You see dappled patches of highlights across his face that mirrors the dappled grime on his face. Look at how the shadows fall on the veins of his hands and try to visualize where the light would need to be outside of the image to create such an effect. Then the image is slightly underexposed to give it a pervasive darkness that was really the mood I remember about this kid.
Most of yesterday was spent cleaning out the garden. It’s the final winterizing of the plants for the season. I put my headphones on and listened to a couple of my favorite musicals and began to pull the annuals, cut perennials, and mound roots of things that need protection. This will be my last garden post for the season. The garden becomes my place of reflection and I typically delve deeper into my emotions and feelings when I am surrounded by its grace. I have not always loved gardening, as a kid on the ranch we had an acre that was mostly vegetables and potatoes and it seemed more of a chore to maintain. In those days we completely lived off the land, canned or stored everything in a root cellar to last until the next harvest. We raised and butchered our own cattle and all the men in my family, except me were hunters always filling the freezers with meat. The ranch was sustained by a natural water spring about a mile up the mountain that we piped down the homestead. Life seemed so simple then. But as a kid I think life always seems simple no matter where you grow up. Yesterday, as I cleaned the garden, I began to realize how connected I have always been with the land around me, just as my father, grandfather, and great grandfather who homesteaded the land were connected. I once had a friend in Dallas who talked about how the people from Montana have a certain look in their eyes that was recognizable, that was different from everyone else. I hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time, but have thought about it a lot since then. Becoming a photographer and creating portraits you become keenly aware of other peoples focus. What I began to realize, that look my friend was talking about was the openness of one´s eyes to see beyond ourselves. In Montana we grow up with our vision focused on the beautiful landscape that surrounds us, the mountains always become a point of focus in the distance. Whereas, when I go to a city like New York, the focus becomes narrow, downward, avoiding, protecting our personal space. In Montana we perceive the entire world is our personal space. This focus changes depending on whatever environment which you are raised. For me working in the earth grounds me and brings me back to center. I have been focused for so long on something so narrow, upfront, personal and close to my heart, that I almost feel like I forget to breathe. But working in the garden gives me perspective of where I have been as I am flooded with all my memories from all my previous seasons of the garden. The garden holds our sense memory within our bodies as often as repeating a task stirs a reoccurrence of a thought associated with that task from before. Several years ago I was diagnosed with cancer and underwent a summer of chemotherapy, though I didn’t have the energy that summer to garden much, I did make it out every day. I was the only way I survived that summer from hell. It is the place where I dare to dream in the solitude of my own head. As a kid I loved digging the mounds of potatoes in the cool fall, there was something satisfying about pulling from that dirty earth something that would sustain you for a year. So the Fall seasons for me, though they represent the earth becoming dormant, signify the bounty of sustainability for a new year. I realize I am a man of many opposites and perhaps this is what I love so much about the process of a garden. Granted, I no longer work the earth to sustain myself and buy most of my produce in the supermarkets, but the idealism of this life is still there and lives within my own hands. At least with the land I know where I stand and to which I will eventually be returned. My thoughts this Fall were on my accomplishments this year and how much I have grown and changed as I realize this has been my greatest year of self-acceptance.
It has been about two and a half months since I returned from my inspirational trip to France and Germany and have since accomplished the goal I set out to do. This morning I have began reconnecting to some of my Man Art and Red Bubble friends and approaching them on the possibility of building a gallery of their magnificent works that could become featured artist on the new site. It feels that I have been in a creative hole since my return from the trip that I have lost touch with all my creative artist friends that are also exploring the nude male form. Hopefully you will begin to see new galleries of their work begin to populate the new website and it will finally begin to grow. Not that I don’t have enough work of my own to do because I still have 32 of my own galleries that we have created, but not had the time to put up yet. The site will continue to grow in the upcoming weeks. I am still trying to figure out some of it operational features and placement and links to the home page. And, I have been trying to take some time off and get caught up with my own life. But perhaps, this is my life. Not a bad life at that if so. The gardens are about to bed for the winter and this seems like an excellent way to spend my winter, stuck indoors working on this vision. Today I have to say thanks to Franz Werner in Berlin, who is one of the most inspirational people who have given me the idea for making this project happen. I have never seen a man so passionate and dedicating so much of his life to showing the modern male erotic form.
OK!!!! Here it is the big day!!!! The website is finally up and running!!!! You can find it at naked-man-project.com. We have put together a limited version to test the site and see how it will function. It’s still a work in progress so there may be some quirky little things that aren’t quit there yet, but for the most part you can get a good feel for what it will become. We currently have eight of the thirty plus odd galleries open so it will give you a sampling of various styles. Sorry I could not get an opening splash page up to warn viewer of the content, but most of you know what that is anyway and will hopefully get that up later in the day. As an option I have chosen to hide the more graphic images from casual public viewing that can only be accessed when you become a registered user. There are ratings at the bottom of the gallery pages, but they are way at the bottom so please feel free to use to give some feedback, you may have to scroll down to find, but am working on bringing them up into the page. And there are comment sections at the bottom of each section for feedback. The blog will now become more searchable via keywords though not all of the blogs have been categorized yet. There is still a tremendous amount of work to be worked through on what’s currently up, but will be refined through out the upcoming weeks as we muddle our way through it.
