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.
I can spend hours and hours looking at photographs trying to analyze the intensity of their felling. I think many photographers once they learn the tools of their craft subliminally allow those powerful tools to work for them. We don’t really have the time to necessarily analyze the image as we are taking them, but all we have ever learned just instinctively comes into play.
Though my thoughts of this boy go back to when we were both 16, nothing developed between us, just a remarkable friendship, but I still remember that longing to become a part of his world; to somehow linger beside him. He ended up marring my best friend and entered a world of greater joy that I had never seen within him before. He finally seemed content. Years later I heard of his passing, probable suicide, and a sickness filled the pit of my stomach. I know I have become a success with this image, when I gaze deep into Travis’ eyes and am haunted by the memory of our faded youth.
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.
Last night a group of us got into a heated discussion about what constituted pornography and what separates it from art. Can pornography be art and vise versa? Since I began this blog the number one post every week that everyone looks at is “Does Showing a Man’s Penis Make An Image Pornographic?” It seems to be the question everyone who works in this field seems to ponder. I know I certainly as an artist explore and often cross that edge. The dictionary definition of pornography is: “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings”. I think the operative word here is intended. Though I don’t really see many of my images as sexual and am not sexually motivated to create them, I became aware last night the impact they have on others. Who views the images and how they interpret them becomes subjective. We all have different interpretations of what we find stimulating or what excites us sexually. When I was younger just seeing a man’s skin exposed got me aroused and stimulated. And yes there was a time in my 30’s I was obsessed and possibly addicted to porn. But as I get older and I become desensitized by so much experience and exposure, I now rarely find things stimulating in that manner. Now it becomes more of an exploration of what it is I remember about that sort of stimulation. Some of my subjects are not prone to exposure and that line never gets crossed, some people are just so damn sexy with their clothes on, how they wear them, and the shapes and textures they create with their presence. Hence the power of fashion. Yet some people look exceptional fully exposed. Everyone is different and the exploration becomes unique for each of them. My role as a photographer is to expose not just their nakedness, but also aesthetic and emotionally. I perceive we live in a culture where we are getting away from our sense of sensual desire. The desire encompasses the entire being and not just parts of that being. My work for me becomes a compass that reminds me of that romantic idealism that has begun to erode from my life. It becomes about how I see myself in relationship to my subjects and sometimes that intention has been to erotically stimulate. So by the dictionary term my work is pornographic. But because I show a man’s penis does not mean the image was intended to stimulate. I have seen so much great male nude art in my life that I no longer zero my focus in on what dangles below, but absorb it for it’s aesthetic feeling. This is why I love art and am fascinated by my necessity for exposure. I got my first glimpse of a man’s penis in National Geographic magazine showing naked aborigines when I was a kid. I remember how sensational it was. I was possibly too young to be stimulated by it then but there was something forbidden about seeing something that needed to remain hidden. Here some 40 years later, I am still pondering its mystery.
In younger days I was drawn into darkness and often found myself lurking in shadows that were unsavory to others and probably not always safe for myself. Being a boy from Montana we do not always perceive dangers that others may be aware of within their surroundings, making us fearless. Being a stranger we may not always be aware of what the rules are and what is normal. Everything in Montana seems safe, unless you have a run away tractor barreling toward you because the diver has passed out at the wheel. I have spent a great deal of time in large cities and have only felt a threat a couple of times in my life. I spent a year in Washington DC working as a bartender for a club in the Dupont Circle area, had a roommate who was a porn actor, we did a lot of drugs and become party animals, some times to the point where I was not even sure how I even got home. In fact waking up one morning, my ankles sore and swollen to discover I had somehow ended up with a pair of pumps at the foot of my bed, I must have traded shoes, the previous night either with a drag queen or a woman with very large feet. I had always heard Washington was a somewhat dangerous town and had known people that were bashed, some of them quite severely, which in those days was quite often. As a bartender with a porno housemate, we become a privileged sort of celebrities who were recognized and often given a certain amount of advantage, in the form of little packets of treats slipped into our pockets. We were creatures of the nights, going to bed as the sun rose, sleeping all day. But I never felt a threat when I was out, even when I got stupid silly messed up. I had a good group of friends and we all kind of watched each other’s backs.
The first novel I ever remember reading that had anything to do with male relationships was called Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. I am not exactly sure how I stumbled upon it or exactly when I first read it, but I remember being very young and it left a lasting visual impression in my mind. It’s the story of an American who recognizes his sexual impulse for men. Goes to Europe is about to get married to a woman, but torn by this unspoken desire that seems to hold him back. He can’t quite make the commitment and they separate in order to give him time to think about it. He is in Paris and falls in lust with a young Italian bartender named Giovanni; they have passionate sex in the grungy dark recess of Giovanni’s room for a chapter or so before doubt and self-reasoning set in. I won’t spoil the ending. It was written in 1956 and Baldwin does a fantastic job of vividly bringing you to this era in Paris. In fact I am quite surprised this has never been adapted into a movie, because the story totally lends itself to that sort of format. There are certain images that have haunted my memory for so many years about this book and perhaps it time to pull it back off the shelf for another reread.
