My life has felt like impression of a dream; it’s as if I belong in another world. Sometimes I question my own reality. As a child I learned to escape the world that surround me. My isolation began early. I keep trying to find meaning in all that and identify the root cause of this discontent. There is a part of my life that is still a wounded child that cries out in the darkness. My universe became a world of escapism and this is where I still tend to dwell. As a child I read a lot; I was caught in the plight of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and my heart had a dire kinship with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Was I destined to lead a life of doomed tragic heroine? There was something poetic about it. As I got older I fell in love with paintings; they offered a brightly colored world that I could visit and lose myself within. I was drawn to the brightly muted colors of the Italian Renaissance and the soft impressionisms of Monet’s gardens. Then in high school when I went to work as a projectionist at the local cinema, my passions shifted to the escapism of movies. For the longest part of my life I felt like I didn’t really belong any particular place and my life became a constant drift. I chose theater because it was the life of a vagabond drifter. Never having to be in any particular place for to long a period of time, I was again drawn to the darkness behind the scenes. The world of theater supported my escapist mentality. Where else can you constantly create an alternate universe and get paid for it? In college I was particularly drawn to the plays of Tennessee Williams; more tragic heroines. My heart still goes out to Alma in Summer & Smoke and that final scene where the puritan woman has fallen from her high moral grace and picks up the stranger, the traveling salesman, to fulfill her longed for carnal desire. I am not sure I was always gay; so many people say they knew they were gay from the beginning. With me I was never quite sure. I have felt a desire for both sexes and enjoyed being with both equally as well. I guess this ambivalence leads more to my loneliness, because I feel like I don’t really belong either way. I have not known a normal life. I have not done normal things. Somehow since childhood I have known I was not destined to become a normal kid. People always mistook this as a sort of arrogance and I was isolated because of it. Through the years, as I have gotten older and though I am not alone, I still feel the isolation and exile within myself. I have great difficulty in communication with others and have found comfort in that darkness. I think this is why I was always destined to become a photographer. A photographer can live and create his own reality and see the world as he wants. I am drawn to the loneliness in others and so these are the objects of my images. They are stories of lost connections, emptiness, and lonely lives lived. The most common thing I hear is that my images have a haunting beauty in them. Perhaps it’s like a car wreck and we just want to see in the lives of others. My images are not an exploration of the beautiful, but the beauty in the ordinary. To elevate the average to a level of extraordinary breadth. To live as an impression of the shadow of ones dream, desire and tragedy.

Yesterday was a fantastic photo day. I have begun perfecting the saturated colored cloth series. Tuesday I photographed another kid in the same lighting set up I used with Travis on Monday. This kid really has a classic body type from the ancient roman era. His face and expression blended with the feel of what I was trying to achieve in the image. We worked with the idea of a beautiful line and flow of his body from the red cloth. So I spent yesterday morning sorting through his images for a perfect balance of color and tone. I became almost too involved with each image that suddenly my morning was gone and I still hadn’t finished the series. I then got to talk to my buddy Ramon in Costa Rica about images, art, and life in general, wrote my daily journal and then one of my favorite all time models Jeremy stopped by for the afternoon to work on some new images.

Jeremy is a person I always instantly connect to every time he comes into the studio. He is currently 24 years old, now has dark curly hair and dark eyes that draw me deep into his soul. I met Jeremy through a gay cruise site when I was looking for models a couple of years back. It was difficult to find subjects who were willing at the time to be photographed nude. It was the fall I had completed construction on the studio and I was desperately trying to find subjects to put the new space to the test. Jeremy and I instantly bonded and he has become my favorite subject to test new theories and ideas. Though Jeremy is young in age he has this old soul quality in his expressions and comfort in his body language. Jeremy, to me, naturally has classical Greek written all over his body. He is a natural in his stance and movement.

I’ve been toying with an idea in my portraiture lately to just using the natural window light in the studio. Though I have used the window light before, mostly to create mood and feel, yesterday’s focus was to use it to sculpt a body. I have been looking at a lot of images from French erotic art of both men and women lately and the images I am most drawn to were done in this natural light. Jeremy was the perfect subject to put it to the test. We disconnected all the studio light and moved all the furniture away from the windows so we would have clean backgrounds and work with only the existing light. It was a rainy, murky overcast day outside and when I first thought I wanted to work in this style, but almost detoured because it looked like the worst possible lighting scenario to work in. But there was a magnificent brightness in the clouds that created a dull glow through the window that made Jeremy’s skin glow. We hit the mark on the first shot and the instant I saw it knew we were in for a wonderful adventure. I am always drawn to Jeremy’s skin; it is perfection in so many ways: soft, pale, luminous. His body tone is supple and well defined and captures the perfect balance of dark shadows that sculpt and define the muscle tone and the brilliance of perfect whites. He photographs well in color or black and white, no matter what kind of lighting, but this light murky light made his skin radiate with an ethereal glow. I am now getting behind on my processing of images. All I want to do is create and work in the beautiful way, day and night. I am becoming obsessed with the images. Fortunately the images are becoming better to work on, which takes up more time. I am taking the next several days off from shooting just to become lost in the beauty of the images from this week.

People always ask me what kind of camera do you use? And my response always seems to be the same? “I really don’t know.” I tend to use the Canon products because I bought into it early when I started and once you begin to get the pieces you want it to remain interchangeable. I tend to buy a new camera about every other year and really don’t pay attention to what model number or pixel count they are up to. The camera just becomes an extension of myself and they all basically accomplish the same things. What is important to me is that it shoots full frame so that I get exactly what I am framing. It needs to be fast so that it flows with my impulse. It needs to be fully adjustable in manual mode so I have absolute control of the image. It needs to be able to shoot in very low light and have a good quality at ISO1600 so I can hand hold and move around the theater to shoot performing arts and dance, live. It has to have the best optics that you can possibly afford. To me photography is mostly an impression of light. It’s the feelings and emotions I get when connected to my subject, animate or inanimate. I have done a great deal of study on the history of photography and have seen awesome images created with a pinhole camera as well as the glitz and glamour of large format fashion. The camera is just the tool. Younger photographers always want to get into discussions about the technical aspects of the tool and this kind of drives me a little bonkers. It’s would be like asking my friends Giorgio Tuscani what kind of a brush he uses to create his extraordinary paintings or David Vandeerpool what kind of pencils he uses to create all those amazing drawings. Or to take it to an extreme what kind of lube a porn star uses to create his art. It’s really not about the tools at all it about your connection to the subject and how you wield those tools to express that connection. I have a variety of different cameras; my absolute favorite was a totally manual Hasselblad, a bare bones basic box, medium format, with many different lenses to express the images in a variety of ways. I began in an area of film and used to shoot lots of different films. Back then every film had a different quality, grain structure, saturation point, or tonal range. Choosing a film was far more important than choosing a camera because it completely impacts the final look of the image. There were some brands I was drawn to over others. We still have some of this control in the modern cameras and can program a few of the properties, but for the most part it is all controlled by the quality/color of light and then all the rest is skewed in post production. To me the most important lessen to learn is exposure and how the exposure impacts the over all images. I still place my shadows where I want them and let the highlights fall where they will. To me the image is all about the shadow after all my life is about darkness and it’s the tone in the shadow I am most obsessed with exploring.

There seems to be some kind of glitch happening with this Blogger site and it has frozen the stats on this project so I no longer know what my audience is. It’s creating a bit of a frustration for me and makes me feel disconnected from you. It’s been going on for 2 days now and to be honest I am just a bit lost. I don’t really rely much on the numbers but it does give me a barometer to let me know if I am still on track and see what you are all drawn to in this project.

Wow I am nearly three months into the process. I feel like I am changing daily. It’s becoming a huge adventure. It doesn’t get any easier to work on, which I thought it might. Time still seems to be my biggest hurdle. Looking back to the beginning I feel I have lost sight of some of the essential things that motivated me to start this task from the beginning. Though I still spend a good portion of the day looking at new images and portfolios, I just don’t seem to have the time to respond to it all. This morning I was actually able to look at my buddy Ramon’s images and give him some feedback, which totally made me smile and brought back to a warm feeling I miss in my connection to other artists. I really miss this. So to all my dearest artist friends that feel like you are being ignored, I am truly sorry. I have become lost a bit in this new world. It’s taken me to new places I never thought I would go. I am getting feedback constantly that is astonishing. I am still not quite sure where it’s all going to lead me and I still feel isolated in Montana in a different way now. I am shooting nearly everyday on this project and it keeps growing.

Yesterday Travis, one of the first subjects I began to work with two years ago, came back and we just played with some ideas. Everything was hitting, the lines, the textures, the extra ordinary beauty of his skin, and the colors were magic. It was like being in a beautiful dream. We began to refine the experiments with the saturated color, and the low directional side light of a Caravaggio painting. I felt like I was in a movie and became lost in the process. It was amazing to see how much Travis has changed since our first shoot. Yesterday we were totally in sync. We explored what I feel is becoming the bane of our social existence in America today. There are so many people struggling, desperate, unable to make ends meet. It feels like everyone I know is being impacted by how bad the economy has fallen. The worst part is there doesn’t really seem to be any solution in sight, and this is the most frightening aspect of all. It feels like we are heading toward the greatest depression of all for our country. The last depression yielded amazing works of art capturing human suffering; perhaps what’s coming will yield great imagery as well. There seems to be so much emotion right now and very little means of expressing itself. The cost of living is becoming so high that so many are losing everything. In Montana we pay a property tax and that seems to become the last straw for so many. Our city and state government feels so big and becomes a huge burden on us the landowners. It’s almost like it’s become a curse to own property and your own place. I sense we are at a tipping point, where it is all about to crumble. This fascinates me as an artist and this was the exploration of my images with Travis. The shoot was a balance of beauty, magic, honesty, decay, frustration, with a touch of desperation. I have not had a chance to look at those images yet, but I could feel it in my soul and sensed these feelings within Travis as well. Only time will tell. Art should reflect what is happening in our culture, and oddly enough, I don’t see so much of the real emotions emerging within the art world. Perhaps it’s only impacting us here in Montana.

It seems we sometimes get into harmful and often hurtful relationships with others. Sometimes these relationships can change our perceptions of who we are, diffuse our focus, and often impair our potential for future accomplishments. I think as artists we need to really learn to protect ourselves from harmful outside influences that can potentially sabotage or ruin us. A friend came by for coffee this morning and was telling me about a friend of his who was a young talented graphic designer who created an amazing design for some kind of poster for an upcoming festival. She was doing a presentation of her design to a group of friends to test it before submitting it. There happened to be another graphics designer in the crowd, actually a student designer, not even yet established in the business, with a very large ego. I listened in horror when I heard how this would be designer completely shredded the truly talented girls work. My exclamation was “I hope someone gave this girls some words of encouragement.”

I worked in theater for many years and saw this type of behavior in that world all the time. It seems to happen a lot with people who were wanna-be’s working in an industry where they may not have the talent, but seem to know enough, to be able to cut others to the quick. Generally these types of people are, for some reason, very popular and seem to have a great influence, but have a vindictive side that just lashes out at others. Criticism is essential for growth; we all need some kind of feedback to move to newer levels and to sometime push us beyond the comfort of our boundaries. My sage advice to people fresh in any kind of creative endeavor is to protect yourself. Find people who are truly talented in what they do, develop a relationship with this mentor so you can trust what they are saying; it will have meaning and be helpful to your progress. Beware of what motivates that criticism. The best rule is to recognize where the person who is evaluating your work is actually coming from and ask yourself if are they qualified to evaluate your work. There are a lot of people out there with a lot of opinions, many of them who are tainted because they themselves have become failed artists. Some of these types of people sometimes are fueled by jealousy, rage and frustration because they envy those who are motivated, talented, and actually making it happen. To believe someone whom you think is popular and the self proclaimed expert in the field can and may totally destroy all that you work toward. I am not saying you have to be a delicate flower, because I think there is no real room for this type of naivety in the arts. But you have to be bold and comfortable within yourself to survive. My many years of working in this type of industry has given me a great sense of my own identity and I have trusted many people who where hell bent on unraveling the very fabric of my existence without much success.

This theory doesn’t just apply to artists and creative souls but for life in general. I was in a long-term relationship with a man whose only desire was to become a famous actor. Yes he was very talented and probably could have moved in that direction, but had such low self esteem that he was not motivated to work at whatever it took to make it happen. He thought the world should come to him. When it didn’t, he settled for something that made him very unhappy and unfulfilled. As my life and career began to take off, the rage, envy and jealousy rose to such high levels within him that I felt I was constantly being degraded for every creative thought I uttered. I was attacked and sabotaged for being a success; it was harmful and I suffered greatly. I put up with it for 8 years out of love, and yes I was very much in love with this person, admired, respected, and cherished him. But I finally got to a breaking point where I recognized that enough was enough and I had to let go. It took me many years to realize it was the greatest thing I have ever done for myself. Once I was away from it, I was able to take a deep breath and become myself. Yes it was one of the most painful experiences I have ever endured and at the time I didn’t think I would survive. But when something doesn’t feel right, it generally means it time to let go. Have the courage and trust in yourself. Recognize and trust in what you do and your process. Be true to yourself. One of my favorite sayings is “Leap and the Net will Appear”, well here I am, and I guess I am still leaping to this day.