I thought this project would lead me more to the sexual side of myself. Sex was always such a big and crucial part of my life. After all, there is a rawness when a person stands before you naked, or at my age, as I stand before myself in the mirror. Though my images are not really about sex, my search for desire becomes a crucial element. The older I get the further it seems I get away from sex, though the desire remains in my subconscious. When I began this process I was looking for what inspired my lust for that desire and the essence of holding on to what I thought was extraordinary through the frame of my image. Somewhere along the path my desire turned toward transient beauty. Now my work seems to become more of a need to connect with feeling and emotion. The roles reverse, in youth I was absorbed by the physical sensation of excitement and touch of sex without feeling; in older age the physical fulfillment seems less important and I dwell in the beautiful memory of that youthful carefree caress. I look back at having spent a lifetime of dancing on the brilliant ecstasy of my own desire and am satisfied. It is now my intention to reveal this in others and sexual preference does not come into play. It now becomes about the remarkable form that stands before me. Light caresses the skin and makes it glow with an eternal glow, whether it is a candle, a strobe or the sun. That caress is beautiful at any age, though our bodies may have become misshapen with passing time.

Fear of failure is our greatest hindrance. This sort of fear paralyzed a lot of my younger life. As artists it seems it’s very difficult to get our creative lives started. In the beginning we haven’t yet developed skills to gain confidence. To choose a creative passion to follow also requires resources to acquire the tools of the trade. For me, when I first began photography, I bought a very cheap camera, the best I could afford. It suited me well through that learning phase. It took me a long time to finally acquire a good camera and my photography dramatically improved. My equipment grew as I could afford it piece by piece and it takes a long time to get much of that equipment. I spent a great many years shooting a lot of images, much of it failures. Constantly shooting every day. A roll or two of film was like my pack or two of cigarettes each day. I certainly couldn’t afford both so I chose not to smoke. I had to have them. I always doubted that what I was doing was ever good enough to show but I gained a guilty pleasure from the process. In the beginning it was like an addiction. I would process everything, but actually print very little. Filing was a constant hurtle. Film had to be protected and stored. I now have cases and cases of possibly thousands of rolls of film in storage. I am now thinking it would be nice to digitize or scan them all, but neither have neither the time nor the money to hire someone else to get it done. I do remember a lot of bad photos. Rolls and rolls of mistakes I chalked up to experience. I often wonder if your career takes off, if any of that will be of value so you just hold on to it. But it is a process that is long gone by the wayside so I am not sure there is much value holding on to all of it. The computer has made life so much easier to sort and archive. I just ordered a 3TB memory to add to the 4th compartment of my computer because my back up and files have grown so large. I do try to clean files out constantly and find editing is my greatest ally. But every once in a while I go back and find rare gems that would have been discarded because I was in a different frame of mind and my perception of what I was trying to create was different. But every image becomes a step to the next, as the process of growth is constant. Often times I will use the same set up in my studio to shoot many different people, exploring a new aspect of it with each subject. They all seem different. Photography is like a compulsion I just can’t seem to stop.

For some reason it feels like the surface of my vision has become boring. The more I settle the less interesting I become. Is this project refining all the hard edges out of my life, healing so many old wounds, that it is grinding all the truly interesting parts of myself away? I am beginning to shoot new things but have lost the deeper meaning that was so vivid in the beginning. So much of my work was steeped on fear and living on the edge of anxiety. If I reveal and expose all that pain and heal all those wounds is the meaning of my struggle lost? I fear it is fading to become a distant memory that will no longer haunt or inspire me to greater work. Last night I sat working on a series that was absolutely beautiful of a young man I shot last week. Some of the best stuff I have produced technically, up to this point in my life. I keep wanting to suppress the really interesting images and keep them hidden, those revealing the darker side of myself that I am drawn to. Does having an audience sway what I am trying to produce and impact its honesty? Have I softened this project so much that I am not really exposing what brought me here in the first place?

It always felt like my relationship with my father was a bit stormy. Growing up I felt like I could never quite connect with him for some reason and I felt a distance swell between us. My brother Mark, who’s a year younger than I, seemed to do everything right while I couldn’t do anything without fear of harming myself. I was mother’s favorite and was probably pampered more by her than I needed; Mark was always dad’s favorite, the perfect son. I was an overly sensitive kid and remember being overwhelmed with so much emotions growing up. It seemed the simplest things, like watching The Wizard Of Oz, could set me crying. Growing up in small towns and on the ranch this seemed to put me at a distinctive disadvantage. Emotions and feelings were rarely expressed openly or shown. In many ways I always felt like my father was somewhat apprehensive and not sure how to deal with such a precocious child. I always had a flair for all things creative, which no one else quite understood, and was left in isolation most of the time. As a child I learned to survive on my own and, in many ways, learned to bottle up and ignore those feelings and emotions, which made me distant from most everyone around me. I often wonder if these feelings actually contribute to my being gay and pushed me toward this lifestyle. Certainly it was never mentioned and I had no idea of such things until I was well into high school. Somehow my family sensed or knew what was going on long before I could ever figure it out. I was glad to leave home when I graduated from high school and fled to Missoula as quickly as possible to escape. Early life for me was painful and I lived through my 20’s in extreme angst. I just couldn’t quite figure out where I belonged, very rarely returning home. It seemed that the tension between my father and I grew wider and wider the older I became. I began to fear hanging around him and a sad anger filled my heart when I did. I felt like I desperately needed his approval, somehow, but could not break the silence for fear of his perceived loathing what I had become or done with my life. It seemed, as much as I tried, I could not gain his acceptance.

Well finally about 15 years ago, when I had finally come to terms with myself and comfortable with the life I was living, I finally approached my father. I wrote him a note one day saying what was in my heart, what I had felt, admitting I must have been a disappointment to him. That I never really knew how to approach or deal with him and that I was sorry for being such a difficult son all these years. Shortly there after my father approached me and we talked. He admitted that he was a bit afraid of me and knew I was different and just never know how to approach or talk to me. It turns out he was very proud me and all my accomplishments. I remember my heart wept with joy to finally be able to talk to him. It’s probably one of the most powerful moments I recall in my life. It was suddenly like a switch had been turned off as I began to realize all my own self-loathing was of my own doing. That I had possibly been pushing people away from me all of my life. It was all I knew. Anything emotional required a barricade that would insulate me from hurt or pain. The emotions came flooding back and I wept.

Since I have built an amazing relationship with my father. We have patched all our old wounds and have become good friends. I have let him into my life and share things with him I never thought possible. We go to football games together and I love to hike with him in the mountains. Many years ago he began working on a trail hiking guide to the lakes of Mineral County. This is where he grew up and had lived his life and he knew those lake and mountains well, it was his passion. We could spend an entire day hiking to visit remote places and he would sit on an overhang and I would see a comfort settle into soul, like I had never seen around our home. I began to see how my father’s connection with the nature of his own back yard was his strongest connection to universe. For a while I was going with him and taking pictures of all his remarkable places. I would lug my heavy lenses and camera equipment to these remote places and I would try to capture them from his eyes. My father has become one of the most remarkable men in my life. I love you dad, thanks for all you have given me and such a precious life.

Today’s image is my father looking out over Hub Lake in the Mountains of Western Montana.

I had a photography friend, Katie La Salle-Lowery, come by last night and we spent a great deal of the evening talking about our creative processes of creating images. She is mostly a landscape photographer with an intense passion for Yellowstone Park. Our approaches are on the utter extreme from each other, but the core of our ideas and base of knowledge of the fundamentals are the same. I began my love for photography the old fashioned way of manual processing in primarily black and white. I was an avid fan of the theories of Ansel Adams experiment in the Zone System he developed and refined through the course of his life. The basic concept was to pre-visualize the subject that you wanted to capture. You would then meter all the various tones of reflectance with in the subject, looking specifically at the extremes of black and white. Then you would begin to see where all the tones fell in between these extremes. I used to have a zone notebook so I could place the tones on the actual scale and know precisely where I would fall within my image. Adams’ theories where then based on the idea that you could either stretch or compress your current tonal range so that every tone in the 10 gray tone scale zone system would be distinctly represented. There then becomes a distinct means of how long you exposed the image and how long you processed the film to place it exactly where you wanted them to lie to create to perfect negative. Believe me it’s a very complicated system that is based in mathematical formula and extremely exciting to work in once you get the gang of it, because every image is unique and become a challenge to push to the edge of your perception of perfection. It was amazing the absolute control you had over getting exactly what you envisioned.

Being a man who loves people and cannot visualize a landscape for the life of me. I guess growing up in Montana where everywhere you look and seeing magnificent landscapes and growing up on a cattle ranch at the mouth of a beautiful wilderness area it was just a part of what I took for granted in my everyday environment. To me the landscape is more about an internal feeling that surrounds me, that I am one with, that I can’t seem to dissect. As hard as I have tired it’s just not in my nature to shoot. But people on the other hand fascinate me to no end and strangely enough Adams’ theory of zone translates quite well into photographing people was well, for some reason I work well with photographing drag queens and placing their mysterious tonal range into a scale that accentuates their fascinating process of preparation. It works well with nudes. It basically becomes the foundation for anything you could ever want to shoot.

When I made the leap to digital, those theories still remain engrained in my head. I still pre-visualize the final image and I still place the tones exactly where I think they will be exciting and represent my signature style of imagery. The only difference now is I am skewing those tones to lengthen or compress them using a tool built in called curves in postproduction. It does an amazing job of being able to isolate a very specific tone and placing it exactly where you want. I think if Ansel Adams were alive today he would have whole-heartedly embraced the now digital technology. Oddly enough many of the tools in the digital workspace are based on his practice and concepts.

What a fun evening of going down that memory lane last night with Katie. Sometimes we take for granted how much we have grown and what has inspired us. I so wanted to set up my darkroom equipment last night and print something by hand. Photography is one of those remarkable things you never stop learning and once bitten you can’t get enough. It grows and changes with you as you change; it’s like a part of your alter ego that screams out to express your inner most desire.