I have a pair of origin stories. The one for polite society is totally true. Since I was a toddler my eyes were just beyond the limits of correction. As technology improved, they got worse. I rebelled against glasses as a tween but the agony of wearing hard contact lenses made it seem better to stumble around blind most of the time, refusing to subject myself to the ordeal. I had figured it out by high school but the club scene was hard on contact lenses. Long days and longer nights, particularly back when smoking was legal indoors, left my eyes hating me. I went back to glasses. Thick, coke bottle things. It got so bad that I couldn't see well at any point and any slip of the glasses was incapacitating. Frankly, the whole thing made me mad all the time. Mad at myself but willing to take it out on others. A kayaking trip down Baja handed me a detached retina after a day getting pounded by waves and the doc who fixed me up mentioned that I would be a good candidate for reconstructive surgery. That's a thing? You can do that? I held onto that sliver of conversation for a few years before having the money to do it. The doctor who did the surgery told me it was going to change my life and she was right. Shortly after, seeing the world more clearly (also lost some nascent cataracts in the process), I was lighting a gala event at the local art museum and became fascinated by dancers moving through the patterns of light. I reached for my phone to capture it and was disappointed at the pale rendition. It dawned on me that I owned the gear to do this any time, I just needed a camera that could recreate what I wanted to see.
About the same time, an eight year relationship was ending. My tall and dramatic Hungarian girlfriend had found someone who fed her cocaine and sent her home at dawn stumbling and slurring drunk. She would leave my house and turn her phone off. At some point in our endless dead-end conversations she told me that she didn't want to see me around the arts community. SHE was an artist. That was HER territory. I think I laughed out loud. I've hosted an art gallery for years, helped produce events with a variety of arts communities. Whether it's music or painting or circus or aerial….I know everyone and have lent a hand to something. But it stuck with me and as I began to try to express what I had seen using a camera I realized that maybe I was going to be the artist. Hell, in almost a decade I had seen her complete and sell exactly ONE piece. Her idea of art was that artists drank coffee and smoked at the cafe. WAY before I was ready, a friend saw some of my photographs (shown here), experiments in lighting mainly, and invited me to show something at her bar. I printed off a dozen pieces and sold two. So the less-nice side of the origin story was a bit of revenge. Winning. I sold more than you.
But the revenge-y part of it…that fell away quickly. I've never been good at being motivated by anger. I forgive pretty easily, I think. Not for everything but my pique will calm down. And while I began by thinking that this technique was going to be THE THING, I quickly realized how much I enjoyed the input from my models. And then it became a challenge of finding THEIR stories and expressing them. And before you know it, I had lost whatever interesting edge I had and was just another portrait photographer heading out on adventures to do "nude in nature" stuff. LOL.
In actuality, I was very fortunate to meet a group of locally-based art models who were instrumental in teaching me about the ecosystem and their input really gave me direction and guidelines. Don't make Hailey roll her eyes. Find a happy place for Jordan River. How to take Floofie's grace and kindness somewhere….where is OUR intersection for this photo? Through several careers, I have always found circles of interesting friends. Growing up in the punk/post-punk Seattle scene of the 80's, the Grunge Years in Portland, the folk-pop scene that Portland's Eastside was drenched in, Burning Man,…hell, even my recent years seeing my friends grow up and into civic engagement…I've always found INTERESTING people and art models are certainly a fantastic genre for that. I've learned about myself quite a bit, as well. I have favorites, I have types. I had never really been single at any time in my life and I'll admit to using models as a faux dating life. I've only fallen in love with a handful of them (heart breakers, every one!) but it's given me some space to understand a lot of things that I had never taken the time to ponder before. I hope that the love and respect I have for them shows through. They are an amazing bunch, particularly in these weird and repressive times.
As we throw ourselves into summer, I am trying to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up, if at all. The pandemic stripped me of a lot of ideas I'd had about how life was going to go and I'm unsure about rebuilding the hamster wheel. But what options do we have? Run or die? In the meantime, I have thoughts about building unnatural sets in natural settings and a Rolodex full of artsy collaborators to push these ideas forward. Stay tuned. More to come!
