Money was produced and they handed over keys. On the way back to the shop an old piano on the side of the road with "free" sign on it grabbed my attention. I pulled over. Before I closed the door on it, I paused and there it was. Lit from above by a slightly moss-covered translucent roof. I was calling my favorite people before I got home. Excited to for them to see it as I had seen it. There's a murky tone to the light and the colors were muted, wood-grain on wood-grain. This was fairly early-on in my so-called career in photography and I was very much in my "but what about the kitchen sink" phase so I rigged up a shower that dispensed liquid coconut oil and bought ten gallons (which proved to be about eight gallons too many). Hailey was one of my go-to choices for everything in that era. Her sensibility was quite unique and I see it these days in someone like Frances In Frame (a model who is on my short list of "really MUST work with" for that reason). I'm not shy about admitting that my aesthetic in nude art is really built upon a lot of late-night red-wine-soaked conversations with Hailey about the genre and its meaning. Or just by a thousand peripheral conversations about everything ELSE but that somehow form an outline of an object in its absence. All the stupid male gaze shit is mine but I try to retain some kind of look around the corner, too. I've come back to these piano shoots repeatedly as I've learned new editing techniques. Most recently, I tried applying unnecessary lens correction to a batch featuring my other go-to of the day, Jordan River, and was delighted or appalled by the grotesque stretching that resulted. Amazing.
It's quite possible that all male photographers share the same struggle but maybe not. The coterie of 'togs who take shots of a bikini up the ass crack is larger than the cohort who get a classy glamour nude is larger than the few who seem to be ready to take an honest picture....is larger than the few who seem ready to move past "hot" into "weird". Or at least that's MY impression. My first two years behind a camera were spent in a quiet little black box that I ringed with theatrical lighting. Armed with good coffee, red wine and snacks I spent three or four days a week shooting obsessively in an attempt to figure this camera-thing out. The models I met were mostly amateurs but the ones that came back frequently reinforced my inclination to get really really weird. Those who showed up once seemed to want a pretty picture and I was happy to oblige -- honestly, I wanted to figure out how to CREATE a pretty picture! I have one hung on my living room wall of a one-and-done model who hit a string of Neo-Elizabethan moments that I am jaw-dropped by to this day. She's awkwardly wrapped in a cloth and the photo looks like a young Dutch girl wearing some kind of chin-strap head covering. Her eyes follow you everywhere when the light hits the print right. That urge to take a pretty picture is easy to give in to. I'm a guy, these are generally beautiful or at least INTERESTING young women and translating that to the camera is certainly part of the skill set. How can lighting push or pull their innate beauty? How can it make them more or less interesting? But I kept coming back to wanting to turn the corner and find the unseen story that hangs around every woman, the one that men don't see because it's hidden in a shadow. That's perhaps where an arm coming out of darkness or an angled leg below the piano comes into play. Ugh. I miss that studio. Summer's coming, though, and all the world's a stage.
Some moments are intimate, some dramatic....some both. Always filtered through our attachment. More in the alt-text.
#pdxphotographer #piano #oiled #situationship #oregon #rainyday #dimlight #naturallight
