Catherine
March 16th, 2007
I don’t do much photography that isn’t nudes. But there are exceptions. Catherine is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met. She is also a very talented professional model and an excellent makeup artist. And she’s a very nice person who I like. But she doesn’t shoot nudes. So I use her for the beauty magazine jobs that I shoot now and then to help pay the rent on the studio. We’ve been talking about some other possible shoots that we may be doing in the next month or so, so you may see more of her. This photo is just one of those moments that happen during a good shoot and can’t be posed or faked.
I actually have several projects that I’ll be working on over the next few years that do not involve nude models. My background is photojournalism and I’ve always been interested in documentary work. I also did quite a bit of dance photography “back in the day.” I’m looking for a good dance company that would like to have me shoot for them. I have a long-term documentary project that I’ll be starting this spring. I expect that project to take anywhere from two to ten years to complete. I plan to post these other projects on this blog as they happen. So I hope you won’t all be too disappointed if you don’t always see naked women when you visit. I have no plans to stop doing figure work, but these other forms of photography are drawing my attention.
Into the woods
March 14th, 2007
More Nemi through a pinhole
March 12th, 2007
Pinhole
March 10th, 2007
It’s a Stretch
March 9th, 2007
It’s a very busy day for me today catching up on all the things that piled up while I was out of town. So, I’m going to let you just enjoy Mandy and I’ll write more when I can.
Mandysickle
March 8th, 2007
Snow Queen
March 7th, 2007
This morning I drove up to the Ohio snow belt to try to shoot some nudes in the snow before it melts away for the year. Mandy was gung ho, ready to get naked in the snow. The weather forecast was close to perfect for this…cloudy with light snow and a temp around 31F. Of course, the forecasters were totally wrong, as usual. Clear skies, bright sun and a temp around 23F. Pretty damn cold. Colder than I really like to expose a model to.
But Mandy is a trooper and wanted to go ahead and give it a try. I had some heat packs to help warm up her fingers and toes between shots. She did a great job and we got quite a few good photos. This is one of them with a quick edit on my laptop in my motel room. More to come…
Slot Canyon
March 7th, 2007
The Nature of Beauty
March 5th, 2007
There’s an on-going discussion on one of the photo forums about the origin and nature of the idea of beauty. If you’ve read my artist’s statement on my website you know that I have some definite ideas about the origin of our idea of beauty and that it is one of the major underpinnings for my work. I thought I’d share a bit of what I’ve been writing on that forum thread here.
I believe that the female body was the original aesthetic object. The most important thing in the world was that woman in the cave. She was the source of life. When the caveman looked outside his cave anything he saw that resembled that female body was something he also valued, simply because he connected it somehow with the woman in the cave. Thus, I think all our ideas of what is beautiful can be traced to the female form. That’s the origin of the concept of beauty. And that’s why I photograph naked women in natural settings…exploring that relationship…and because it’s fun to get beautiful women to take their clothes off, of course.
I believe that beauty as we humans perceive it is entirely a human construct. It’s narcissism. We think things are beautiful because they look like us. More specifically, we think things are beautiful because they look like women. If we were constructed differently we would have a different definition of beauty that would reach across all cultures.
This is not a new or original idea. Remember the movie “Men In Black”? The bug-style aliens thought humans were very ugly. Imagine the most vile disgusting living creature you’ve ever seen. Now suppose that creature were sentient. Do you think it would have a different definition of beauty than the one we humans use?
At the core, beauty is sex driven. It’s a derivative of the reproductive imperative. As such, our concept of beauty is meaningless absent the presence of humans to see and appreciate it. Beauty as we understand it is entirely a product of the human mind, hormones and instincts. Different creatures would construct a different idea of beauty.
On the broader question of the place of beauty in art…well it seems to me in contemporary art (as opposed to art that is of any lasting value) beauty has little place. Since I want to make beautiful photographs I assume from the start that my work will not be valued in the world of contemporary art. I don’t care. I like to think that when I make a beautiful photograph, in some very small, almost, but not quite, insignificant way, I’ve made the world just a tiny bit more beautiful, and hence better.
So, here is a photograph of the beautiful British model Eden in a beautiful slot canyon in the red rock desert of southern Utah/northern Arizona. We think the slot canyon is beautiful because the shapes in it are very similar to the lovely shapes present in Eden.
Print sale!
March 3rd, 2007
