Category Archives: Places

A Boisterous Clap Of Thunder

I was up until the wee hours of the morning again thinking about an incident that become a catalyst in my life some time back. It was one of those moments where you know your life will be changed and a new vision of yourself becomes clear.

I was working as a stage manager in a small theater in Spokane, Washington. I had signed on for the season that lasted about a year. Bob and Joan Welch owned and operated this little mom and pop kind of theater called Interplayers that always produced astonishing works. I had seen many productions because my friend Michael Weaver worked at it for years and I was always intrigued to see what he was involved in. He introduced me to Joan and somehow we instantly bonded and became infatuated and know we were destined to collaborate on something. The supposed story behind Bob and Joan running this remarkable theater in such a remote place was even more intriguing. They had been a part of the legendary inner circle of Actor’s Theater in New York, but were blacklisted in the McCarthy Era and fled west to begin life anew, yet still follow their passion, theater. Though I was currently a member of Actors Equity Stage Union, the only way I could work with them at the time, which I was very determined to do, was to change my name to work under a non-union contact. But I know I wanted to work with these extraordinary people. And it was so worth the experience, because they brought theater to a level I only ever imaged it to be, delving into the inner depths of character in such an organic means for the actors to live the characters within the story. Every rehearsal I was awestruck and captivated by their approach and process of discovery the life of the play weather it was farce, comedy or drama.

I loved Spokane, a city built on a river, much like Missoula, that had once been host to a World’s Fair, when I was a kid, but had since been developed the site into a very beautiful park. The theater was near the park and I often wandered down there to have my lunch on the banks of the river, it was fall in paradise. I rented a very small apartment, which had once been part of a larger house divided into several units in an old historical district. Well about a month or two into being there I began to notice a strange odor within the space. Progressively, day-by-day, it became stronger and fouler. We all began to search our apartments to figure out the source of this terrible odor, but could not figure out the source. Finally it got so bad we called the landlord in to investigate. They began to work through each apartment systematically and eventually found that a young man who lived on the bottom floor alone had killed himself and had been there for a week. I had meet him several times and knew he was loner. I suspected he was gay, but of course was caught in my own busy schedule, and since he lived on the backside below me didn’t really get to know him. I eventually found out that he actually was gay and had been rejected by his family and had become infected with HIV and was lead to this desperate act, feeling completely isolated and alone not knowing where to turn. My heart sank deeply when I heard the news because I being a close neighbor, and also gay, had not reached out to him. I was so overwhelmed with regret and remorse that it had taken us a week to realize his isolation. I remember being so disoriented, angry, and hurt that I could barely function at the job I loved so dearly. Of course we could not move back into our apartments for several days as they tried to erase the odor that permeated the space. The next several days as I grappled with coming to terms with the event it become crystal clear in my mind that I would have to dedicate my life to helping other gay men who lived in such fear and isolation. And I began my own campaign to make people aware of HIV and break down the barriers surrounding its then seeming terror it had on others. The reality that the loss of humanity, dignity, and pride was suddenly too great to be ignored any longer. I as a gay man could no longer look the opposite direction or hide. A reality hit my world like a boisterous clap of thunder and I know my world would be irrevocable changed forever.

I Couldn’t Sing…

I’ve had many great loves in my life, most of them ending so badly that I learned to put up a protective barrier around myself in which I could contain my emotions.  It doesn’t mean that I gave up on loving it just become more cautious with it.  I am a person who leaps with all of his might and I still believe in the magical power of romance.  I have always believed in loving hard and when it was over recognize the differences and move on.  The first one is always the hardest and as I think back it had the most impact on shaping the person I have become.  First of all to be gay and live in a place like Montana, to love a man meant we battled a host of odds just to dare being together.  We met in Montana in the cold of winter in a porn shop.  It took us to Illinois in the spring and Dallas in the summer.  Ironically Dallas is not noted for its cold winters, but the coldness between us grew to a devastating icy chill that became one of the hardest winters of my life.  Eventually I was abandoned in a strange city, left alone with nothing but a heap of debt and a broken spirit.  I was foolish enough to believe in a dream and while the dream lasted I floated on a sort of heaven.  They always say find them in a porn shop, lose them in a porn shop.  I was too naive to know any difference.  He loved sex with everyone but me, and the pain of not being good enough caused an emotional breakdown that still aches in the back of my heart.  One cold morning I abandon everything and jumped on a Greyhound bound back to my home in Montana.

When I returned I still felt displaced and it took me a year just to recover.  Just when I thought I was over it I feel in love with a fraternity boy who was a student from North Dakota.  This was sensational and this time I utterly fell head over heels.  Neither of us had a place to go so we had to find public places to engage each other so Missoula and it’s surrounding mountains become a dreamy paradise.  When school ended for the semester he returned to North Dakota to work for the summer on a construction job.  We wrote and called each other every day making plans to actually move in together when he returned in the fall for school.  Then three weeks before he was supposed to return, I called one night and his mother told me he had been killed in an accident on the site where he worked, crushed by a bulldozer blade.  My body and mind went numb for months afterwards.  I thought I would never recover that feeling.

My next leap was about getting high and sexual addiction, again being abandoned in the end as he moved on to someone else.

At this point I was seduced by a married man whom I didn’t want to have any thing to do with but had lots of money and was quite persistent.  This gave me a sense of power and made me fearless to go after the things I wanted.  After a year of secrecy I began to look for something more meaningful and then found what should have been the love of my life.

This time I knew it was love and I had finally found happiness.  We both loved theater and spent a great part of our lives making each other laugh.  It was fantastic sex, a total connection, as my heart leapt for about 8 years.  But then something began to grow wrong.  It seemed he was consumed with a raging jealousy and began to sabotage everything things I did that was creative.  My life was just beginning to take off in theater and he being a talented, but failed artist himself began to destroy all the things I worked to create.  Eventually it become so unhealthy that I finally had to get out and it took me three years to end.  I began to realize my life had become a Tennessee Williams story and indeed had experienced so much pain that it was ether time to write a country song or become an artist in which I could express all that feeling.  I couldn’t sing so I turned to photography and in the end found myself and happiness with a man who finally accepted me for what I was and did.  And here it all is in the images of my life.  That pain, that isolation, the fear, and the doubt!  I have always heard that all artists must suffer in order to become great artists.  If this is true, perhaps I am ready to become that artist.

 

The Exhaustion of Joyous Occasions

As much as I tried yesterday I could not find a half hour of time to even get on my computer.  It was Montana State vs Montana Grizzlies, Brawl Of The Wild Game at Montana State in Bozeman.  The biggest game of the season, the Grizzles being the underdog ranked #7 in the nation against the #1 FCS team.  Needless to say it was an upset and the Griz beat the Bobcats 36-10.  Since the game was in Bozeman, Glenn planned a party in the studio to watch it on television.  So my day began with a breakdown of all my lighting equipment and hauling to the basement.

I also had a later afternoon wedding I was booked to shoot.  It was an all day process of prepping and shooting that from early afternoon through the reception late last night.  I love weddings, but they a tremendous amount of work for a photographer.  The process of preparations takes several days leading up to the wedding as well as becomes all-consuming on the day of the event.  My process and approach for weddings is much the same as my process for nudes.  I like to get to know the couple so we all become comfortable with each other and I just become a part of the wedding party.  I love candidly shooting all day as events unfold.  I approach it as an insider documentary style and get great results because most of it becomes very candid and allows everyone to just naturally become who they are as if I am not even present.  I completely engage and interact as a participant instead of as a casual observer hired in from the outside.  I then put the entire wedding together as a series of slideshows put to music that becomes the couple’s remembrance of the day.  Most often when they come back to the studio to see the final presentation both the bride and groom are so deeply moved by the presentation, they become weepy.  I have so intimately entered their world and captured the essence of who they actually are and often capture things they were completely unaware of happing around them.

My approach to the wedding as well as all photography is to first assess the natural light and merely enhance what it already there.  And yes this becomes quite a challenge with weddings because you are constantly bouncing around from space to space throughout the day.  The bride’s chamber, the groom’s chamber, hair salons, the church, the altar, and the reception hall.  I typically will go to all the locations days ahead and test shoot so I know specifically what I am dealing with.  This is one process that doesn’t get easier with each wedding because each one is in a different location or space and each wedding is uniquely its own.  There is absolutely no formula to follow.  Yes the sequence of events are the same, and I know better what to look for, but they are never consistent.  I love weddings for this reason.  It’s like highly emotional theatrical events that unfold before your eyes that you become caught up in.  Some one said to me last night, you have one of the best jobs in the world getting to shoot people at their greatest moments of joy.  I paused and thought about it for a moment and replied, absolutely it is one of the pleasures of my life.

But by the end of the day, I am utterly exhausted.  I feel like I have poured my entire soul into the day.  I often don’t realize the soreness until I collapse on the sofa at home, then it settles in and I can barely move.  They have always exhausted me, even when I was younger.  I realize I had been working for 8 hours solid with very little breaks, yet I feel elated because the images I saw though out the day were so beautiful.  This was my last big event I must shoot of the year and know I can now begin to focus on my naked men.  But today is a day of recovery, very little of anything else.  I am scheduling a massage for the afternoon and nothing else.  I will sit with the kitties in the widow and watch it snow outside.

Navigating the Labyrinth

Made a huge leap with the website yesterday and last night.  We have finally been able to connect it to RSS to create feeds and social links.  We have also linked to Google Analytics so we can see how people are using the site.  These were the last major missing pieces to this labyrinth of a project.  Now I can begin to focus my energy more on the content and less on the structure, and I can openly release the site and begin promoting it.

I am still missing the splash page and can’t seem to figure out how to add it with this Joomla 1.7 system.  Each day we get closer.  The blog section is now completed with links to feed.  If you are currently using the old RSS feeds, please convert them over to the new site as I would like to close down the other blog.  The new site has a very good search engine that enables one to find almost any post instantly.  Danny has been working diligently on breaking all the past blogs into topics that can now be accessed from the list on the left hand side of the panel.  We will begin to focus more of our energy on creating a monthly gallery of the past blog images so they may be readily browsed.  Then I will create a master list of titles that can also be indexed and will become searchable.  It’s amazing to think I have created so much text in such a relatively short period of time!  It suddenly has become a massive body of work for someone who is not a ‘writer’ to have created bit by bit.  I wish I had created this website first – it was my intent to create it much sooner – but I just couldn’t figure it out.  Now it has taken ten weeks to get this whole thing up and running as it is.  My total cost on the project so far has been $135.00 for the entire site.  But the learning curve has taken a lot of time and effort and trial and error to understand its dynamics and functionality.  Although very technical, it has also been extremely creative to figure out.  Once I begin to add the content to the site I will begin to market myself as an artist, collaborate with other like-minded artists, and begin recruiting new models to become subjects for my various studies.  So far, being in Montana, I have had great difficulty gaining the credibility to be taken seriously by potential subjects.  “You want me to what?????” is the common response.  There always seems to have been a sense of perversity surrounding the idea of men exposing themselves nude, or partially nude, that has been the source of greatest resistance.  It is the process of establishing myself with quality tangible images that I believe will make me more accessible.  After all, it is about creating the images, and my connection to the subjects, that brought me to this sort of creation in the first place.

The Passion Of Mythic Gods

Wow a morning and afternoon completely free with nothing scheduled!!!  It feels like months since I have had a window like this open.  The only thing I have to get done today is my posting for the day on here.  The ground outside is now frozen and winter in Montana becomes very slow for business that allows me time to focus on my creative endeavors.  This is the time of year I get to shut myself into the studio and just focus.  Shooting and the website will become the heart of what I do all winter.  I love to make soups in the winter and fill the space with savory smells and invite others into the space to work on new concepts and ideas.  I haven’t even had a chance to think about where I want to go next.  I know the website will become a major focus as we begin to hone and refine it.   I have begun to order some new books on male nude art, with a focus on painting.  I have now proven myself as a photographer and now need to focus on images that get more to the heart of who I am.  Topics I am most interested in are Greek and Roman mythology and I see how powerful its influence has been on so many other artists.  What is it about these images that are so deeply connect to us?  Is it the classic beauty or the actual myth that tugs at our heart that we want to identify with?  I am particularly drawn to the theme of Orpheus, the idealism of intoxicating music that lulls us and being so captivated by another that he is willing to risk going to hell in order to retrieve it.  It has been in my head for years and how we tell this story is not entirely clear yet, but is worthy of exploration.  I am quite surprised that this is a story that has not been reworked for cinema.  The theme is universal and captivating.  It seems we all live in an era of loss, a time where we all search for desire and to be connected to something we want to love.  We forget how beautiful and poetic life becomes as we begin to build barriers to encase and surround ourselves.  I know I have.  It seems life becomes more of a struggle just to maintain a normal existence.  The theme of loss of a part of oneself and what we need to do the recover it fascinates me and basically has become the primary focus of this year.  As an aging man, I want and need to revisit what was once vital to my youth.  But is seems the darkness of life surrounds and often shrouds us locking us into a protective barrier that we often cannot overcome and so we become stuck in a place we may not necessarily be comfortable or even happy.  Though I have lived a creative life most of my adult life has remained hidden behind this curtain.  Now that I have reached this place of comfort and security within my own self I begin to ponder, why did it take me so long to get here?  What was I really so afraid of for so long that held me back?  My life has certainly not been easy, but then I know neither has anyone else.  I am beginning to think our plight is to struggle with finding meaningful existence, yet I remember a time when I was so idealistic and my dreams wider then the ocean.  Now I have crossed those oceans and the idealistic dreams are back.  But it feels there is a huge hole or gap in the middle of my life filled with loss fueled by uncertainly and loss.   I think this erodes at the core of our self-expression and breeds doubt.  I think it is the mythology of hero that surpass the insurmountable odds that become so iconic and perhaps this is what mysteriously draws us to emulate them.  It’s defiantly worth of the exploration.