A Leap of Faith

OK here we go: a leap of faith. I am finding t I am wanting to retreat into my sorted world of insecurities, which I must admit can consume me. But now is the time to really begin my focus on beauty and art and that’s what this project is really about. I am deeply romantic at my core; it’s one of the things that really excites me about who I am. I don’t really care to change the world, and for the most part am very withdrawn from it. I love soft light and constantly strive to work with it in my imagery. In fact my entire studio is completely wired on a series of dimmers so that I can have control of creating the perfect environment for whatever mood I am in. Music is an integral part of that romantic allure. I love music; all kinds of music and often becomes part of the design. For me this is what the photograph becomes about, setting up the environment for a tone, a feeling, an emotions and creating that entire state of existence. It becomes intoxicating, entrancing, and often time very hypnotic. It allows me to bond with the subject so we can go on a highly personal journeys together, to get to the core of what I am feeling, and explore our identities.

When I first got into photography I was drawn to the images of Robert Mapplethorpe. I was not sure why. Was it the mystic behind the person? Was it his bold approach to subject matter he tackled? There was always something in the images that riveted me to his subjects. I spent many years searching for my connection to his work. Much of his stuff was so far removed from my world and existence. Yet it was haunting, like a siren song. There was such poetic beauty in the imagery. Year later after I had begun to develop my own style I read an interview with him that suddenly made the connection for me. He basically said that you must have a strong connection to the subject. He loved to talk to, in fact insisted on personally connecting to his subjects first. This builds trust and draws them in. In this business I meet so many strangers. When I begin to work with someone new I always plan some time where I can talk to them, really connect to who they are. I am curious about people by nature and have an even stronger curiosity about what it is within myself that is drawn to this particular person. The photographic sessions then becomes an exploration of myself, my own personal journey, and to eventually unveil what is remarkable about this subject. And yes, every single person has some remarkable quality within them, it’s just a mater of how guarded they are to reveal it and let it surface. Somehow people trust you as a photographer and are more susceptible to allowing you into their inner selves. Some of these bonds last, some of them are fleeting, but it always lingers with what’s left behind, the image.

“End of the Relaionship” series

So “The Postcard from the Edge” fundraiser in New York seems to have been a huge hit. Another photographer named Steven Rosen selected my postcard and sent me a message. “It’s such a lovely image, but I have to say I was saddened when I found out the title. I was drawn to the shot because the two men seemed so in love. There were loads of images of beautiful men both alone and engaged in all sorts of sex acts, but your shot was the only one that seemed to have any real emotional content. Knowing that the relationship was ending casts a bit of a pall over the image for me, but it’s still very beautiful.” There was a huge response to my posting “Postcards from the Edge” so I thought I would follow it up with my journal entry from the photo shoot and another image from that series.

October 25, 2009
A great Sunday morning lying around the studio sipping coffee, listening to Dexter Gordon blow the sax, and catching up with myself through my journal.  Color begins to fill the sky though windows above my bed and create a beautiful blue glow on the textured walls surrounding me. It’s been forever since I had such a great morning. This morning I am filled with wonder, confidence, and longing. I am finally feeling peace and in touch with the space.   I am loving what I have created here. What an inspiration. Last night I had a gay couple over to work on some nude couples images. We all worked together to fixed a really great dinner of Paella, had a couple of bottles of Pinot Noir and chatted.  We took and break and work on some of the most beautiful images I think I have ever captured. The first set of images was of them in the shower entwined in each others bodies. After dinner we moved into the studio and did some extraordinary images of them lying on a bed. It stirred such a longing in my soul to watch these two extraordinarily beautiful men captivated by the other. Their bodies moving, twisted, entangled, arousing and igniting sheer sensual pleasure, writhing, rubbing, caressing, tender, passion, deeply gazing into the others eyes, responding to the others soul, colliding, giving, receiving, touching, fondling, tasting the others flesh, totally in tune and turned on by the others tenderness, excitement and pleasure. I was overwhelmed and in awe of the beauty of the love and passion exploding before me. It made me realize what an extraordinary life I have had and all the experiences I have been a part of. To photograph this was one of the highlights of my existence. I recalled these moments within myself when I was that age and consumed by such passions; and now to be this age and able to step back, connect to these desires and record these feelings once again. I was caught in a hypnotic trance of reliving my own passions igniting as if I become a part of their flesh and passions exuding before me. This was the way I approached sex!  How have I gotten so far away from it. Modern sex seems to be only about fucking. Modern pornography is only about fucking. Is this all we know or learn. Is an orgasm the ultimate goal and do we miss all the sensuality that leads up to and in between. Sex was never really about the actually climax for me, it was always about the building of pleasure, giving and receiving. I was flooded with old memories, thoughts, and impressions of my own experiences with these passions igniting from my past. I suddenly felt a stronger connection to Glenn and all that he means to me. Once they had left I called him and almost burst into tears still overwhelmed by my experience. I guess that’s what a great artist is, someone who delves, explores and then expresses all those emotions within his medium. It becomes my inward connection to how I present and express my feeling toward my subjects.

Fear Of What I See In The Mirror

Somehow, today, I feel I have completely lost touch with who I am and where I am going with this project. I have spent the past couple of days researching and trying to figure out how a blog actually works. What it needs to have, how to expand it, and how to make it grow. I am finding it’s all way too overwhelming to think about and plan. Have I already been derailed from my concept by the very means needed to capture the concept? It’s perplexing, confusing and downright distracting. I have so many thoughts in the head. It’s swimming with ideas of what I want and need to say. Suddenly there are a lot’s of eyes with their focus on me, responding, recognizing things in myself I have never been aware were ever present. I feel like there is now an expectation. The bar has been raised and as I began to write today become paralyzed, gripped by terror, almost frozen unable to move. Can I live up to the remarkable things others see within me? I have always heard fear is a great motivating factor to get things done, so I guess it’s worth exploring.

When I look in the mirror who it is that I really see? I have never been much of one to admire myself. As a child I was awkward, gangly, and very uncoordinated. I didn’t have many friends and totally lacked any semblance of self-esteem. My retreat was to create a world of my own, a world where I could create something remarkable beyond myself. It’s taken years to get past those painful remembrances of self-loathing and isolation. Of being able to trust in myself  and recognize I was really worthy of any kind of talent. Growing up in a rural sate like Montana, creativity was completely misunderstood because it wasn’t in the norm. It was a non-sustainable hobby that was more often discouraged as sentimental or emotional. Athletics were the suitable substitute to suppress sentiment and emotion; you could work out your aggression on an opponent. My family really didn’t get me. I was that creative black sheep. Though I was involved with plays they never once came to see what I was involved in. I just learned to adapt and was persistent to fulfill my driving desire to create. I never was never quite sure what, but knew I needed to create something, anything as long as it revealed my hidden self and let me express myself.

When I become an adult and began to explore my sexuality, I suddenly found a place where I was accepted, where I did belong. It was exciting and intense and filled with wonder, beauty and mystery. The raw sensual self was allowed to emerge and celebrate the release of all kinds of emotions: love, beauty, seduction and passion. My body was not as disjointed and awkward as I had been lead to believe. Yet I could not see these remarkable qualities within myself. I guess, have always been filled with self-doubt. Through photography, this exploration of myself and working to revealing others I am coming to terms with my own self-image. Why has it taken me all of my life to get to this place of feeling safe and comfortable with my own identity? There are still a few residual temporal insecurities that emerge when I look in that mirror and see a man approaching middle age. Self-portraits have always been a difficult thing for me to create. I have such a different image of my self then what appears in the image. I look deeply into them and ask myself: is that really me? Self-portraits become an agonizing search for who we really are. So many people come into my studio fearful or afraid of what they might discover.  Yet I am a master of discovering and seeing all those remarkable qualities in others, why do I have such difficulty seeing it within myself?

To strip away ourselves and really look at who we are is very unnerving. For some reason when we look in the mirror, all we seem to see is a reflection of our flaws, our imperfections, things we don’t like about ourselves, yet I know if we look deep enough there is a discernible beauty buried deep within all of us. Photography becomes a mirror, and in that mirror of art we can see the most remarkable things.

“Having just a vision’s no solution…”

Glenn worked a miracle and some how replaced the hard drive from my laptop and I spent the morning rebuilding everything back to where it was before the crash earlier this week. I still lost all my personal files and journals from last year. The computer now seems some how better, faster for sure. I am back in business. Wow I am exhausted after all the hubbub this week from my constant battle with technology. People are actually responding to the new Facebook page and this blog. I am awestruck by the kind words and encouragement people have been giving me. The greatest response from most people is: “I didn’t know you did this sort of stuff and your caliber of work is top notch”. Ye-haw!  I now know I am heading in the right direction only after a week of work here. The greatest compliment of all was from Hank who wrote this:

“The past is but a fading memory; capture the turning points and record them as markers; the future is a mystery; capture the dream of what could be; the present is just that, a gift; record it as if there is no tomorrow and no one around to play god and pass judgment; you are more than you realize to others and have made unseen difference in many lives; record it, let it emerge as a light in a dark place, a beacon in moonless night.”

I asked him where the quote was from and he said he wrote it about my work. Wow this totally blew my mind, thanks Hank!!!! Week one and I have 28 followers. Thanks to all of you out there for your support.

Phase one is complete and I am underway. My next step is to begin creating a website. I feel like I need some kind of marketing tool to begin to promote what I do. This is going to be more difficult to get done. I had hired a kid a year or so back to reinvent my business and come up with a new website but we never quite pulled it together. I got busy, then he got busy, then I got busy, then I wasn’t quite sure the direction I wanted to go, meanwhile I pumped a lot of money into it, and now I can’t seem to reach him to move forward, backward or even recover what we have already started. So it looks like I may have to begin from scratch again. I always love this process of creation. I have been researching this morning to see about getting Dream Weaver and the learning materials needed to get started. My goal: by the end of January to have a new website up and running.

My second objective is to find models to work with and begin creating new images for this “Naked Man Project”. After seeing my work, you may be thinking this won’t be difficult, but it’s the most difficult part of this whole process. Montana is not a hotbed of people willing to work with me on these sorts of images. It takes a lot of networking, I mean a lot of networking and most of the time it leads to someone saying they are interested, we schedule something and they never show up. It’s my constant frustration with trying to create art with other people as subjects. Once in a great while I will find someone and then work the heck out them. Two of my favorite people to work with are Jeremy and Travis you will begin to see a lot of their images on here in the upcoming year.

My basic approach is to come up with a design element I am interested in exploring, for instance: working with a piece of fabric, recreating beautiful light I saw in a painting, revisiting a memory of an experience I once had, an emotional state I may be in. Some of the concepts are tangible, some abstract. I then bring in subjects I want to work with and explore the possibilities of that concept or idea. The process is quite fun. Most of the people that come in to be photograph have low self-esteem of themselves. They never quite see themselves the way I can. Almost everyone is totally blown away by what they see and find in the images we have created together. It’s an organic process from start to finish. It begins with talking and getting comfortable with each other, then as they begin to reveal themselves and explore their own sense of identity I am there to capture them in the most beautiful light, that matches where they are emotionally at this point in their process. I coach and encourage people to break out of their norm and trust their own process. It’s not just hot young built bodies I work with, there are all kinds of people, different sizes, shapes, and personalities; men, women, couples, gay, straight. Women are typically more reserved and self guarded and often have the images created for their husbands or partners that are away in the war or something.  They somehow feel comfortable with the fact that I am a gay man and trust my sensibility toward beauty. They do not allow me to show any of their work, hence The Naked MAN Project.  Most men could care less who sees them in this light, I respect everyone’s right to privacy and confidentiality. I believe there is something extraordinary about everyone and will study them until I can find how best to capture or bring it to light. It is the process of finding beauty that captivates and ignites my passion. This week’s focus will be to find new ways to network and find some new subjects to work with.

“A vision’s just a vision if it’s only in your head!
If no one gets to see it, it’s as good as dead!
It has to come to life!
Bit by bit, putting it together
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art
Every moment makes a contribution
Every little detail plays a part
Having just a vision’s no solution
Everything depends on execution
Putting it together, that’s what counts!”

“Putting it Together” from the musical “Sunday in the Park with George”
Lyrics by Steven Sondheim

 

Postcards from the Edge

We are a week into the new year and I have accomplished the first phase goal I had set for this new new project.   I have created a Facebook page showing a large assortment of my imagery and varying styles.  In case you have not seen it Terry J Cyr Photography on Facebook. This process is defiantly forcing me to look at my library and sort though my images.   It’s actually kind of fun to begin working toward creating some semblance of a portfolio of what I have done.   It surprises me to see my images together.  As I am looking at it I am thinking wow did I actually create all this.  I think sometimes, as artist, we stay so focused in the details of what we are currently dealing with that we don’t always see the over all picture of who we are or what we have become.  I have begun this blog to pull my thoughts, ideas, dreams, and experiences together collectively.   I do not really know if anyone out there has the time or inclination to read or become involved with other peoples lives or experience.  I have always journaled and spewed forth what was in my head.   It has somehow always helped me to gain perspective and it give me direction.   The more important part of this process is that I have actually become disciplined enough to post this each day.

Today is a hallmark day for me as I have an image that is opening in a show in New York City.  It’s part of a show called Postcards From the Edge as a benefit for an organization called Visual AIDS.   My friend John Douglas from Sydney, Australia has submitted work to it before and suggested I also do so this year.  He suggested it would be good exposure for me and start to get my images out there.   So here it is!  I keep questioning: with the world filled with so many images and artists how does one get their stuff out there and begin to become recognizable.  I feel my talents have been hidden from the world.  I just didn’t know how to approach expanding my market.  I know it’s something I have got to constantly work at, to network and reach out to others globally.  But who are these people?   Last summer, I joined the Red Bubble community, which was a collective of international artist based out of Australia.   It was the first time I had shown any of my images and I was quite surprised by the response.  It felt as if I immediately become a hit with a community of like-minded artists.  I even put several pieces into a show in Sydney.   But then I got busy with the summer and was distracted with other work.  Without constant working of the site I soon dropped below the radar and disappeared back into oblivion.  The big question: is there a market for any of this kind of stuff and where do I really want to go with it?  I would love to focus on this sort of imagery, but it takes time and how do I juggle everything else to still maintain this?  Where, or even will I find a tipping point when I can make money on such images and be able to sustain myself economically, to be able to make it grow?   My big hindrance has always been; are my images worthy of going into a global market?   I believe they are!   I am surprised by what a body of work I have amassed over the years.   I think this show in New York is a step in the positive direction. I now need to find other ways and places to submit my images.   I need some help figuring it all out. Anyone out there that may have a suggestion?   I am willing to try anything.

Today’s image is part of a series I called “End of the Relationship.”  Its was about two guys who had shared a remarkable relationship together, and realized they both were now heading in different directions, that it was time to let go of each other.  They wanted to capture the essence of what they had once held, and allowed me into their world for this brief glimmer, before they departed.   This is the image currently in the “Postcard from the Edge” show and auction.