I awoke in the middle of the night and made my way to the bathroom in the dark. As I stood at the toilet releasing myself, I felt a strange lump in my groin. It startled me because I hadn’t noticed it before. When I got back to bed I began to check it out. It was hard in nature, but there was no pain associated when I applied any kind of pressure. It was fairly large in size, obviously it has been there for some time, why hadn’t I noticed it until now. I had just begun working the preload at UPS a couple of months earlier, the job entailed unloading the large semi trucks loaded with packages at the local center. It was a lot of work and I was often lifting heavy packages. I thought perhaps I was developing some sort of hernia from all the lifting. Preload started at 4 in the morning, because we had to have every package sorted and on the driver cars by the time they arrived to begin delivery at 8. Each morning was a furious race to meet the end goal. Though they had taught us safe work methods, it was still a fairly strenuous process. When I got to work that morning I reported the lump I had discovered in the night to one of my supervisors, because if it was a hernia I certainly didn’t want to aggravate it. My supervisor agreed and put me on a lighter duty for the morning. I remember now it was a Friday morning, because when I got off work, I headed to a Now Care Clinic to have it checked. They too thought I might be a hernia and told me to come back if it didn’t go down over the weekend.

I took a light weekend trying to stay away from strenuous activities. My lump continues to grow and seem to get harder the bigger it got. By Sunday it had gotten to the size of a golf ball I was beginning to feel a lot of pressures in the area. Now I was beginning to freak out. I knew this was not a hernia and that something was wrong. Monday morning after work I visited a clinic, a doctor there looked at it, wanted to do a biopsy, but was reluctant because of the arteries in the area. They arranged for me to see a surgeon to take a look at it the next morning and get the biopsy. Again it continued to grow and was now becoming somewhat painful. A cold shudder runs though my body as I remember the morning I received the call saying it was a tumor and they needed to remove it within the next couple of days. I was just finishing my shift at UPS and my heart sank, as I resisted being consumed by my emotions. The drive home, I was in a numb struggle, gripped by a powerful fear, yet trying to maintain a mental alertness to at least get home safely. Glenn met me at the door, and it felt like all the sorrow I had ever felt in my life rose up and overtook my emotions as I collapsed into his embrace releasing a deep sob. The next couple of hours where like a tidal wave of emotions, stronger than anything I have ever felt. It was a beautiful spring morning and my first impulse was to garden. I have always had a strong connection to the earth, growing up on a ranch that we had farmed. One of my greatest passions is to garden; to me it’s my inner sanctuary where I can escape and feel the earth beneath my hands. In this moment I had to touch the earth and somehow feel grounded again. It must be in my family because I remember when my grandfather died I went out to the ranch to stay with my grandmother. She too worked the soil to deal with her grief and loss. I could see and feel the pain in that little hunched body as she fought emotion and dug with her hands in the rich soil. Now I knew those feelings for myself as I toiled weeding and beginning my spring clean up. It’s funny how uncertain we can become in our lives. We are all vulnerable at any given moment. In a sense it is in these moments we face our greatest fears that we are actually reborn. A part of our soul awakens and we know we are on the incredible journey of life.

A certain unshakable dread filled my mind this morning as I woke. Four years ago to this day I found a lump on my right inner thigh, which would later be diagnosed as Lymphoma. Fear, panic, dread filled the next several days as I underwent surgery to remove it, saw all kinds of doctors and testing, and eventually began Chemotherapy. We had caught it at the early stages before I had spread to any major organs and spent the rest of the spring and summer getting zapped with chemicals every three weeks. Every time I just began to feel good again I was knocked back down. I had a very busy life at that time, and was determined from the beginning, that I was not going to allow the cancer to stop any of it. I still worked all my crazy jobs of photography, gardening, UPS, and lighting for theatrical productions. My doctor and friends always laughed that I worked the cancer around my schedule instead of allowing it to control me. I planned the therapy for a Thursday, so I would have the weekend to recover and it would have minimal impact on my regular schedule. Oh but it did impact me, I lost my energy and I had to take lots of little naps throughout the days. At times the nausea and sickness from the drugs would become overwhelming that I just felt like I couldn’t move, but I surprisingly got through it with little interruption, just a little slower than usual. I now know cancer is more common than I thought at the time. I now know everyone is somehow impacted by it. I know many people who have overcome it currently leading healthy lives. But my biggest fear was remembering what it had done to my friend Gilbert several years before who did not survive. In many ways going through it with Gilbert had already prepared me for facing my own process. At the end of what seemed like an interminable summer, I finished the process, thinner, emaciated, and bald. Throughout the process, I struggled to maintain normalcy, but it still managed to stripped me of my physical sense of self identity and devastated me finically. Eventually it did come to an end. As my body and strength recovered and my hair grew back, something mentally inside of me jumped into hyper drive. I had faced mortality, and began to think about what I really needed to achieve with the remainder of my life. There was doubt and uncertainty as to how much time I would actually have. Was I now more susceptible to other cancers? How long would the treatment last? Had this just prolonged my life for a few years or was it to it’s full maturation? I felt shrouded in uncertainty. Suddenly I became an overachiever and began to go after things I had only dreamed about. This is when I really began to explore the remarkable beauty of naked men in my imagery. Up until now I had only dabbled in it, but I knew this was one of the things I must do within my life time. Tell the story of my own sexual history though my imagery. You see growing up we had no role models for homo existence. It was hidden or subversive. I wanted to somehow create a new model in which gay men could see themselves with dignity, pride and respect, where they could be in touch with their sensual/sexual selves without having to be debased or demoralized, to see beauty in the male form of art that we can emotionally connect to and be inspired by our feelings and emotions. Somehow as a gay culture we have always ended up on the bottom of the social heap. I know that is changing and ever evolving, Most of my life has been about finding the humanity of myself as a gay man, and it has been a struggle most of the way. In the past four years I have built my dream studio, got to the core of what is meaningful to me, began submitting my images publicly, and finally embarked on this project to share my experience.

Creating images is becoming an addiction!!!! I have been shooting a new subjects everyday all of this week and wow, it feels like a huge leap every single shoot. I have never had this kind of consistency in my images or work. This week has been completely about naked men. I feel like I barely eat, drink, or sleep because I am so caught up in the process and images I am working on. I had a photo shoot this morning with a guy from Seattle that was sensational. Incredibly mesmerizing, I totally identified with him on so many levels; we have a lot of the same history, hang-ups and insecurities, but seem to be at the same place in overcoming them. Together we explored a concept, we both felt, about escaping the implied feminine impulse we felt being associated with being gay and our struggle to regain the masculine side of ourselves. The images are sensational, some of the best I have every created. I felt the influence I am seeing in the French imagery I have been studying lately, creeping in. I am beginning to rethink my center point of balance in my images. I am trying to force myself to shoot off my normal axes of balance but am encountering great self-resistance; it’s like driving a car off the lines of the road. Our instinct tells us to stay between the lines, and all impulse keeps us there. To cross those lines implies danger, hazard or possible death if we go to far. For me photography is about the geometry of the image. When I first got into shooting I did exercise after exercise in finding, seeing and shooting that balance. It certainly comes into play in theater and on stage. I rarely look at an image without seeing the geometry that governs its shape, form and texture. Triangles are very strong and important to me. A slight bend or S shape can almost give me an orgasm. I know this sounds crude but we must respond strongly to impulse whenever it’s present. Excitement wells up within and comes across in the image. After all, the image is about feeling and when it stirs something deep within you, something powerful is at work. Thus the process of creation becomes an addiction. I tend to shoot about 700 to 800 image per shoot, exploring all the possibilities, angles, perspectives, a variance of light, a variance of movement, ever responding, ever present. I used to try to narrow my images down to a dozen, but now shooting such volume is becoming increasingly more difficult to separate and sort. There is way too much sensational stuff and I have to eliminating stuff that I may find brilliant later. Sometimes I cannot drag myself away from the monitor, like today, because the images are evolving and my perceptions change with each image. I was the same way in the darkroom, but there you become lost in a time and space and merely existed in a dark void. I guess it really hasn’t changed that much.

Today’s image was one such exercise I did in my early days. It’s called HARD, it’s about things that are hard, muscle, hammer, expression and mass of weight. You will see a very strong triangle with the face and the arms outcast to the sides. There is even a slight S curve in the axis of his torso. The overall structure is a hard line from top to bottom. See even exercises in photography can still be fun, and you just thought there was half naked man standing in front of you. I hope I didn’t get too geeky for anyone out there, but after all this is my fantasy.

I think I have reached a tipping point with my art and this project. I now have subjects to shoot every afternoon; it feels great to constantly be exploring new ideas. Several months ago when I started this project it felt like I could not find a single soul to work with and it had become a constant frustration of scheduling things and not have anyone show up. Today I am right where I want to be. I have so many people talking to me about art and my vision as an artist. It’s remarkable. I have to reprint part of a conversation I am having with a man from Paris:

“There are lots of wonderful things in what you do. Have you studied history of art? From an European point of view, your project, the picture of body studying, show a modern point of view of the studies of shade, contrasts, shapes, the refinement of the muscles movement and use of the position of each one during your choices of scene to show by this the beauty of a line, of an effort, of virility, on each one, one can see that you chose to make the model move that way rather that that one to show his best for a better transmission of your messages these being super creative and artistic. In terms of lightning you use very well the effects on the muscle contraction or inflation or rest. Same for the taint of the skin, hair, eyes, features of each person you know how to put it forward. Great stuff congrats! All these show men as human beautifully being without coming into the cliché and stereotypes and that’s one major point I love with your work: beauty, pure beauty research though body movement, expressions, textures, scenarios, choice of model with personality and creativeness out of the “déjà vu” and standards and not a drop of vulgarity which unfortunately many men’s photographers do. Please continue. Cheers. François”

People are finally beginning to get what I have been trying to do for years now. It is an amazing time to come together as creative artists and redefine the homoerotic art form; to make it personal, intimate, and sensual. We tend to forget that beauty actually resided within the person and not on the exterior. We often do not see this beauty because; first we are not looking for it and second we are too guarded with our lives to allow others to see who we are. I have been working with a series of models this week to explore that very notion, to uncover to get to the root of who they are. I like to find subjects who do not have a very good perception of themselves. For some it is very difficult and takes a great deal of time to get to that moment of release, of letting go, of trusting within ones self, admiring, respecting, and breathing. The subject is not always aware of the connection at the moment, but I can see it emerge and this is what I desperately wait to capture. When the subject eventually comes back to look at the images, they then recognize it, and most often are quite emotional to see that I have captured something within them, an inner beauty they have always felt and longed for, but feared to acknowledge. These feelings are overwhelming and become trans-formative in the vision of ones self.

My biggest question is why do we not see ourselves for the beauty we are? We are all amazing creations, but somehow become blinded as we grow up and mature. I certainly still deny seeing it within myself. I spent many years struggling with self-doubt, completely unable to see my true identity. If someone had shown me this kind of mirror of myself at that age, would my life have been different? Would it have eased the self loathing and fear I had, that created a monster within me that has so often almost destroyed my existence and derailed my path. Much of my life feels like it has been a pinball game, bouncing, whirring, colliding, unsure of the outcome, but knowing I would end up losing that ball back into the machine from where it began. It is time for all of us to take control and stop buying into all this false security we are presented in commercial media, porn, and drug escapists denial and redefine our selves as a culture that looks deeper, into the personality and complexity of the individual to recognize and accept all our shortcomings and faults. I am tired of being afraid and my art is an exploration to change it.

In the fall of 2003 I planned a trip to NCY because The Metropolitan Museum was hosting a show I was particularly interested in seeing: a retrospective of the black and white portrait images of a photographer named Richard Avedon. His prolific career spanned at least five decades as he continued working in the field up to his death in 2004. An obituary published in The New York Times following Avedon’s death said that, “his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America’s image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century.” This particular exhibit excited me because the entire series of portraits was shot with only a simple white background, so the subjects are completely out of any type of recognizable context. You are confronted with seeing them for who they are, ordinary people, honest, raw, and emotional. It was a style I admired greatly and tried to emulate. I am always excited to see what lies behind the façade and these images promised to allow the viewer an inside perspective into it’s subjects. When I walked into the exhibit I awestruck by how massive these images were. They were about 10 feet tall and completely lined the walls. The vibrancy of the whites made them pop and glow on the walls making the whole show so stark, haunting, and riveting. Many of them were celebrities and influential people of the past several decades, but there were also casual ordinary people he happened to meet along his travels, all photographed in the same way. I spent hour and hours walking though this show, revisiting images over and over. In fact it was the only thing I saw in the Museum that day, because I could not pull myself away. I felt so much begin to stir in me as a budding new photographer, and was mesmerized that he had so easily cut the core of what I have been trying to achieve and find within myself. It turns out this show also contained several images of people he had photographed while he was in Montana.

A couple nights later my friend Billy and I had tickets to see an all star cast, in an intimate production of a obscure Bertold Brecht play written in 1941 called the The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui down at Pace University. The cast included Al Pacino, Tony Randal, John Goodman, many French actors I had admired from films and most of the cast from the then popular Sopranos show. We had front row seats to a show that was near impossible to get tickets for. It was a limited run in a very small space. Our friend Derek was one of the dressers for the show and somehow had managed to get us into the event. The show was as stunning as you would expect. Brecht created a satirical allegory of the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany told as a fictional ’30s Chicago mobster, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the opposition. After the play, the cast and crew were gathering at an Irish pub near the theater just through an alley. Derek invited us along to hang out and have some drinks with everyone. So I am sitting there meeting all these amazing people and in walks Richard Avedon. He happens to know one of the people at my table; it turns out they had recently done a shoot for a show that was soon opening on Broadway. So he sits at our table and I get to meet and actually talk to him for about an hour. We talked about his work and life in photography and time spent in Montana and of course his show at the Met. I felt like it was one of the luckiest days of my life; it’s like being struck by lighting. (Which is another story still to come.) My life has been an amazing series of events that I think are catapulting me toward something extraordinary. I am not sure what it is yet, but I feel it’s beginning to surface.

Yesterday, Sunil Narayan posted this on my Facebook wall “You produce some of the best photographs in America! If you were working in the 1950’s you would be part of the legendary photographer trio (Richard Avedon, Fernand Fonssagrives and Irving Penn) :-). I would love it if you were hired by French Vogue. “ So Sunil though I am honored by your comparison of my works to those of such greatness, I do not think I am quite worthy of their status though I walk in their shadows with great adoration.