I am starting to reconnect with some of the subjects I have shot in the past and this week will begin shooting with them again. It’s always fun to go back and shoot with people I have worked with before, because you already have that instant working relationship. I have a strong desire this week to get back to that Caravaggio lighting style I began working with at the beginning of the year. The staging and set up for this style seems to take the entire studio space to create the balance of light I am looking for. It’s not just lights, but layers of scrim filters upon filters. More goes into blocking and controlling the light to a confined space then actually allowing the light through. I have today off without much distraction. We were supposed to begin putting the web site together and I had scheduled all day to work on it, but we are having a problem loading the templates and are waiting to hear back from the designers, who are in Europe. Most of the information has been gathered and written and is ready to insert once it’s installed. This gives me today to focus on research and looking through old paintings to find that inspiration for the upcoming shoots this week. This is really the favorite part of the process, researching and figuring out what it should or needs to look like. I saw so many paintings in the Louver while I was in Paris that seemed to contain the feeling and essence of where I want to go. It is to touch the core of raw emotions and get to what makes us vulnerable. One of the patrons I have met suggested that I need to begin a series of self-portraits, exposing myself in my own style. The shooting this week will become an exploration of where that self-examination can begin, of looking at how I fit within the structure of my own process. I am hoping to see a more positive image of my physical self begin to emerge. Sometimes this is the hardest thing an artist must do, set aside their preconceived ideas of who they have become and see who they actually are. Mapplethorpe was brilliant at this, to face himself so unafraid without compromise. I began the year and the first blog with a self-portrait of myself and now it’s time to revisit myself once more.
Category Archives: Photographers
Memory Of The Senses
I am still a bit completely out of whack and trying to get myself back on track. Taking a couple of weeks away from the studio and other work seems to have just put me a bit behind in some areas and this week is mostly about getting caught back up. It still amazes me how much I manage to accomplish within the course of the day. I spend about three hours gardening in the mornings, then photography all afternoon, sometimes squeezing a little nap in before heading off to spend my five hours at UPS in the evenings. Everything seems to be part time in my life and I have been a good one for juggling all this. The gardens seem to be one of the places of my greatest joy. After seeing such extraordinary gardens in Paris, I am totally inspired with some new ideas. I really see, what an extraordinary design I have put forth in some on my own spaces. A garden is like a living sculpture that is constantly evolving and changing. Something new blooms every day. Fortunately here in Montana we actually have winters and so you really see the evolution of the entire garden process with each distinctive season. Yet it allows my winters the freedom to focus back on creative photographic projects. The gardens become my time and space to reflect on myself, dream and plan. It’s my daily breath of fresh air and becomes a renewal of my spirit.
I do not mean to come across with mostly negative intent in doing this Naked Man Project. I particularly feel quite healthy and balanced and after this past trip. I am definitely coming to a greater understanding of who I am currently and where I have been and yes there are issues that I am still dealing with. When I reflect on the past, it is that a reflection, and a sort of remembrance, as was yesterday’s post. I believe the past is the key to what makes us what we have become today and that everything we learned springs from our wealth of experience. But I think there are great lessons and insight to be gained by understanding the history of who we are. Part of my mission with this Naked Man Project was to give a true reflection of my time and history as I have lived it. To be a young man, growing up on a cattle ranch in the mountains of Montana, who turns out to be gay and creative is remarkable feat in and of it self. And yes there have been major pitfalls and obstacles to over come to get to this place where I exist currently. This is my experience! I have given myself one year to explore this identity and somehow come to some understanding of where I currently stand, but part of the fact remains that it is still a chronicle of a man becoming a product of his time, living in an era of the greatest changes of the gay movement which has been extraordinary the past 30 years in it’s evolution. And yes I see what an extraordinary part of it I have become and continue to be. It is my objective in my imagery to redefine the way we look at our selves in the sexual/sensual self. To see the body and it’s soul in a positive light. We tend to live in a world of exploitation, where the self-image is completely compromised, and so much of our culture has such an unhealthy outlook on who we are. I know this because these are the issues I have spent my own life dealing with, first hand. But we cannot ignore, nor should we forget, the history from which this all springs. I now see how the Naked Man really is the exposure of myself and the discovery of identity, and the way I have viewed this change. I will and want to delve into that past to take you there first hand.
In a sense the project become three fold. While it exposed the past, it still is a growing and learning of my own self and gaining perspective and ultimately the birth and creation of my self-expression. When I first took up photography, I was enamored by the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. In many ways I saw him as a pioneer who was able to unabashedly expose his private world for others to see. He very shockingly showed a mirror unto ourselves and to the world, what we as a culture were too afraid to examine. That time was ripe and he became the product of his time. I remember how squeamish yet enthralling it was to examine his work for the first time when I discovered his books, many years after his death. This was what brought me to taking of a camera and focusing it on my own existence. Please bear with me in the upcoming months as I explore that past and come to terms with my own history. In a sense this is like tending my gardens where the sense memory is re-ignited with a certain touch, a smell, or the color of a flower that connects me to places in my memory. These thoughts reoccur each year, at the same time, in the same place, in the same manner, and are vividly relived each time. I have been doing it for so long, it’s as if the plants and trees that surround me now contain the memory of my life.
Does showing a man’s penis make an image pornographic?
When I was first getting into photography and still shooting on film, I had a young gay man come into my studio whom I wanted to shoot nude. He was very excited by the prospect of seeing what we could create together. His only stipulation was that he did not want any pictures where he would be naked and show his face in the same image. He was okay with doing nude torso images from the neck down or face pictures from the waist up. I agreed and said I would work within those parameters. Hey, I had a live model who was willing to strip down and allow me to light and explore him naked through my photographic process.
He had a classic form and moved and stood in such a way that I knew would be reminiscent of a Greek sculpture. I worked very hard to create a lighting design that would make him look fantastic. We had an amazing session and both were excited by what we had created. I processed the film and printed the contact sheets. Though the images on the contact sheets were raw still, but I could visualize the beauty which would emerge from the prints. I called the kid and arranged a meeting, excited to show him what we had created. When he saw the contact sheets, he too was excited and seemed quite pleased. I gave him a set to take home because he had a boyfriend he wanted to show. I headed back into the darkroom and began to work on one of the images. It totally began to come to life. I printed it on a beautiful flat silver gelatin paper so that the tones and flesh had a smooth velvety finish that looked as if they were actually emerging from the darkness. Everything fell exactly where I knew it would. The print was remarkable. I felt like I had created a masterpiece that could hang in someone’s bathroom, or in an open space, or maybe even a gallery – very classic in its pose, form, and structure. To me it represented perfection for this type of image. It captured the essence of the pictorialist style of the photo-secessionists from the early 1900s. I had been studying the photographers and the movement from this era and was particularly drawn to the images of Fred Holland Day. I had succeeded on every level to create his style of imagery. In structure, light fall-off, and soft focus beauty on the flat paper.
I called the kid back and told him what a remarkable image we had created. I immediately knew something was wrong by the tone of his voice. He did not want to see the image and did not want to work again because he had shown the image to his boyfriend who said it was pornographic. His boyfriend did not think he should lower himself to the standards of creating porn. I was stunned and shocked. It really got me questioning the distinctions between art and pornography. It has been a question that has haunted me for most of my photographic career. In my mind’s eye I had created a remarkable piece of art, yet someone else had seen it as pornographic. Because there is a penis in the image, does it automatically become pornography? In a sense, this kind of hurt me creatively. I felt like I was heading in a positive direction and this reaction made me fearful of asking anyone to pose naked again. If people saw what I was doing as porn, I would get that kind of reputation, and it would kill any chances of finding models to work with, in our small town. It also put doubt in my approach and stirred a question in the back of my mind every time I worked with nude images thereafter. It took me a long time to ask someone to pose nude again.
The kid never saw the final image. I put it away in a box to be lost with other worthless images I had created. Now to be pulled out many years later and finally shown here today. Wow, what was I thinking? How could I allow someone else to influence such a great part of my creativity and hinder my creative process.
Objectives of The Naked Man Project
My goal and objective in creating The Naked Man Project is to explore my own precepts of art and the creation of male erotic art. When I first began photography in 1997 my teachers always said “shoot what you know.” My background was theater and I was a gay man living in the wilds of Montana.
I spent 10 years on the road working as a professional stage manager and lighting designer. Eventually, I reached a point, growing tired of being nomadic and scrambling for work that I decided to return home. Montana, as you may have guessed is not a hot bed of professional theater, although it does have some very good things going on. The fact of the matter is I was born and raised in Montana and my family still lived here. I had visited or lived in most of the major cities and realized that my small town sensibilities just did not belong in that kind of environment. My first love true love was with a man. There was something exciting about growing up in Montana as a gay man during an era when it all felt taboo. Forbidden passion ignited a hidden sub-world of intrigue, mystery, and allure. When you connected with someone you knew it would probably be fleeting, so you had to savor every possible moment and take the experience to it’s fullest sensual potential. Often times the experience become like an intoxicating dream that remained in your head as a romantic reverie.
The nude male body certainly seemed to have been a taboo subject among modern artists. To paint, to draw, or to photograph the nude male generally implied you were gay and that fact often needed to remain hidden. Certainly images were still produced, but most of it remained underground. It wasn’t until Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1970’s that homoerotic art really began to emerge. Ironically it was Mapplethorpe’s work that brought me to photography. One fall, while I was working backstage at a small regional theater, with little to do and a great deal of time on my hands to read, I accidentally received his biography from a mail order book club Mapplethorpe: A Biography by Patricia Morrisroe. At first I was appalled by the graphic descriptions of his explicit sexual lifestyle. Yet I was captivated by a man who had the courage to utterly express himself, to explore his own sexuality , and create a remarkable visual representation of his perceptions, experience, and environment though the creation of his imagery. I instantly knew this was to become my destiny and when the current theater job finished, I wanted to returned home to begin my own process of discovery.
My goal with this project, is to explore my own artistry and desire and my need to create beautiful images of the male nude. To expose my inner sensual/sexual identity though a daily blog. The project: for one year I will post a new image each day that I have created and examine my need to create it.
