Thanksgiving 15

 I've been sitting on these photos for days, not really quite sure what to write about. I have found myself writing differently on this blog. Things have been less heart, and more mechanical regurgitation of events. My blog was always a place where I could pour my bleeding heart out, which is why no one ever read it. Here, on an "official" website, it is much harder to really write how I feel because of the demand of "professional" demeanor. Fuck that. I still am who I am, whether you like it or not.

I mentioned in a previous post that my girl has shown a sudden interest in modeling. I am still not sure how I feel about that. I have been very open about the fact that every single relationship I ever pursued, or allowed to happen, was based on the girl's willingness to be shot. This girl was supposed to be different because she appreciated what I did, but wasn't completely interested in being a part of it, other than the support that should exist in any healthy relationship. Now she is showing interest in it, but it is different, in that she wants to do it independently from me. The past girls have been fine with me shooting them, but no one else unless I was there, and there was one who, after much persuading to do so, finally went out to work with other photographers. This one has been very vocal about not wanting to be attached to me professionally.

She wants to do it on her own, which is part of her stubborn nature. In the mean time, she doesn't have an extensive portfolio, and I'm me, and I know who I know, so I still serve a purpose... professionally. Aside from the work itself, I have been giving her pointers on social media, which is an entirely different entity for an attractive girl who's interested in modeling, than it is for a male photographer who shoots nudes. She is overwhelmed by her online response, while I am left somewhat depressed about the reality of it all. This is about her, though, isn't it? It's not about "us" or what I'm trying to accomplish....... the reality of it all.

So, back to the original topic that I've been sitting on: since her sudden interest in all of this, we spend our days off shooting. She is constantly wanting to shoot, and regularly suggests shoots that are great ideas, but rarely work, simply because of the technical limitations of everything.

Days off: for us that has meant Wednesday. Thanks to the forced holiday that has always left me disappointed, in which the theme is to give thanks, we both had a Thursday off. The child was in Alabama with her dad for the week, so we headed out to Joshua Tree proper and explored the desert all day. Indian Cove was the first destination, one which I had been wanting to scout for a while. That really describes most of Joshua Tree Park. There is simply too much ground to cover. This spot is on the northern outskirts, and was full of climbers. We avoided them. This was our first "official" shoot, where she was actually interested in accomplishing something. She was a lot better at it than she thought she was. She is great at exploring her space, and getting better at internalizing emotion, and she started getting some more confidence looking at the shots in camera. I should also mention that it was "Southern California Cold (50)," so we had to stay in the sun and pause for gusts of wind. After that we headed north toward Landers to shoot a random huge stack of rocks that I've been wanting to check out. The rocks were covered in broken glass and (mostly shitty) graffiti, plus the storm was close enough to unbearably chill everything, but on the way we discovered a golden toilet on top of another stack of rocks, so that was worth it in and of itself. We hit whatever place we could find open on the way home and had our first Thanksgiving dinner together. Every day is a beautiful day to be thankful for.

I should probably add that the first photo in this set was on a freeway onramp where I had stopped to have a cigarette. She got out of the car and handed me my camera. She's that interested.

Day Off For Thanksgiving

 

In my six day work week I get one day off (obviously). That one day is Wednesday... today. Today I worked because another employee took the week off for Thanksgiving. It was a short day, mind you, but it was work, and I left in a panic, against my will, because I didn't get everything done that I would normally feel comfortable getting done. I still technically get a day off tomorrow because we're closed on Thanksgiving, but we had planned a two day adventure instead of a day and a half adventure.

Luckily, there was conveniently a full moon tonight, so night shooting was a definite option. Unluckily, it's November, so it's fucking cold. We decided to give it a go anyway. "We"; the romantic storyline. She had presented a location to me when we were planning our "two day" getaway from the exhausting grind of daily monotony: Noah Purifoy's little art museum just north of Joshua Tree proper. This is the very same location that I was taken to summer before last on those breif little adventures that existed in my poverty and solitude. While on those adventures, I remember thinking that I wish I had someone to shoot, because the person I was with wasn't up for it. After getting kicked out of work we headed down to my little valley town to have Thanksgivingish dinner with the woman who calls herself my mother, and, suprizingly, my boy, who is 20. Yeah, I have a 20 year old son, so, that will never cease to be weird. These damn winter days end so quick.

After an early dinner and exchange of Christmas presents in the parking lot, which included a breif musical performance on a new guitar by the boy, we headed out to Joshua Tree to attempt a full moon shoot at the hopefully empty and hopefully not freezing art museum a lá Noah. T'was empty; t'was fucking cold. Well, maybe not for someone who lives in Minesotta, but it was cold for a model in Southern California (45 degrees). I went into it with a "stupid" approach: I have been trying to figure out shooting with the full moon as a key light source for about six years; I demanded on using my new faster lens, but completely ignored the focal length and focus difference in a longer lens. Stupid. The whole time I was focused on wether or not she was

holding still enough for a 5 second exposure, but I failed to realize, until driving away from the location with the heater blasting, that I should've been using the slower, wider lens, for the sake of big picture focus, like I did before, easily fixing the .RAW photo later. I didn't have to fix the exposure in these shots, sure, but the depth of field is shit, and she was so cold that getting her to hold still was absolutely impossible.

I even tried giving her more solid anchor points, like laying flat on the ground, but there was still shivering. I candidly left the shutter open and got some interesting effects, but over all she was just a little bit out of focus, which is the nature of the beast when shooting long shutter releases. I should also mention that we stopped to purchase a flashlight at RightAid, to assist in focusing, that worked for one setup, so we used my phone to help focus in the dark. It was a good experience. We had a decent time. It. Was. Fucking. Cold. More shooting tomorrow, on our actual day off. Happy Thanksgiving.

Anastasia Pt. 3

I really haven't worked with that many "professionals" in my short lived career shooting what I want to shoot and doing things the right way, and the precious few that I have had the opportunity to work with have been more random luck than anything else. I have been approached by some amazing models, but usually my schedule or finances don't line up with the opportunity I am presented with. C'est la vie. This particularly extraordinary soul found me back in early 2012, when everything happened to line up beautifully.

Little things like that have made my life what it is. Those are the things I have been trying to define; those are the things that I've just let be. The summer after shooting her I ended up catching her and Rebecca Lawrence on their tour (I booked her in January, LA, and September, desert. Figure that one out). After that, after really feeling like she had become a friend, I basically disappeared. Shortly thereafter I was almost beaten to death, and by the dawning of 2013 I had been fired and evicted, well on my way to solitude and banishment to the desert.

When she announced that she was on her last tour of the States as a full time model I knew, after everything that was my life, that I needed to reconnect with her somehow, but my work schedule didn't line up with her dates, again. After talking with her a little about my only day off during her time in Southern California, she serendipitously asked me for a ride to San Diego from LA on a day when I could.

I got her to her shoot an hour late, because driving in LA fucking sucks, but everything turned out beautiful. My girl has shown some unexpected interest in "modeling," and I knew Ana was more interested in shooting, so I presented an oppornituy for her to shoot my girls, plural. While she was at her booked shoot in SD, I scouted out a beach that has personal history, and my girls drove down from my little mountain town to meet us. Everything strangely worked. I don't even know how to describe it.

We didn't have much sun, so I encouraged Ana to use it to shoot my girls, while my girl encouraged me to shoot Ana...

I wish we had more time, obviously, and I can only hope that Anastasia captured more beautiful things to add to her portfolio, on her beautiful journey. In the meantime, everything keeps moving forward, and I am grateful for every single, beautiful, little moment, with my girl, and my family, and this strange little circle of amazing friends.

Je Ne Sais Quoi

 

I feel a strange kind of openness, a freedom, a(n) je ne sais quoi. As I grasp on to my old material here, I feel a whole new world opened up before me. Even the term “old material” seems foreign to me; this is my life’s work. This is a life’s work that I still can’t define or explain. At some point I think I stopped trying; I just kept going, even when going on didn’t make any sense. I could apply that to my life as well. That tortured genius who turned out to be an idiot had a plan, much to the confusion of all those who had to deal with him. The plan began at an absurdly young age, when the spectrum or understanding of life, and the beauty that exists therein, was only a dream of expectation.

The plan didn’t pan out; I’m still here. I knew that if I went through with it, my work wouldn’t end up where I had wanted it to. I had no one in my life to write that romanticized memoir of… well….. some guy that no one knew existed, aside from those who seemed to only remember the bad things, in a way that made them far worse than what they actually were. Maybe that was just how I chose to perceive how others perceived, based on what I perceived… dot dot dot. The holographic argument makes me wonder why we, as a species, hate ourselves so much. I really feel like I can ramble in these little “blog” posts, knowing that very few are actually paying attention. What was I talking about?

It used to torture me that no one was paying attention. I hated myself for not having done anything significant enough for people to actually want to pay attention to what I had to say. The five year old blog made it worse, because in order to see any of the good pics you had to scroll through pages and pages and pages of crap because I posted so much. That was an amazing evolutionary process, if you can stomach scrolling through it all. Most can not, in fact I am quite impressed when people actually do, but… but… is it worth the years of sweat and tears so that one person in North Carolina might be moved by your story? I don’t know. I always said that if I could reach one person I would be happy, but I guess I expected…….

I expected. I expected to be dead. That’s what I expected. I expected to leave all these words and images for someone far more brilliant than I to cram into something coherent and interesting. Talk about delusions. When you’ve said or done the same thing enough times……….. I didn’t take into account what people actually pay attention to: generally, they don’t give a shit about who you are or what you’ve been through, because we are all great and have survived a lot in each of our regards; people want what people want, and when you’ve spent your life refusing what people want, people don’t tend to want you.

My drive to shoot nudes was part of my trying to get out of societal expectations and ideals. I was trying to escape the mundane norm. It’s one of those things that people love, but they don’t love to share. It’s one of those things that people appreciate in the privacy of a dark room when no one’s around, but they won’t frame it and put it up on their wall. That seems to seriously reduce everything to something absurdly simple, but I am simple… I am a simple idiot. I expected my unnoticed example to change the way people approached things, when most people feel the same way I do, they just do it… differently, I guess. I don’t even know.

Everyone around me seems to have a beautiful story that I missed out on. I demanded to be surrounded by extraordinary souls who do extraordinary things, so I ended up alone. I found someone who I thought was extraordinary, but she just perpetually feels like she’s not good enough because of my irrational expectations from this mundane life… and there’s this beautiful little tabula rasa soul, who will grow up with some serious issues if I don’t figure my shit out.

I’m sitting in my car on a foggy, cold, autumn night, at my little Southern California mountain town’s “point,” chain smoking, drinking, and writing; I am 16 again. I’ve been 16 this whole time. I wonder if anyone has noticed? The soundtrack to this evening’s blah is Sigur Rós’ Kveikur. We all have shit to figure out, and we all have great stories. The trick is in telling them in a way that people want to hear them. I love my new family. I’ve got a job that I love…mostly. I’m working too much in hopes to support my new family. I’m not shooting in hopes to be “normal.” I’m not writing in hopes to be just another guy with a good job and a beautiful family. That’s the secret to happiness, isn’t it? Fitting into that mold that society tells you you’re supposed to fit into?

So, amongst this collection of images… this life’s work… I am fighting to be mundane while struggling with being mundane. This is a delusion of a delusion. This is everything and nothing.

I’ve abandoned reading for enlightenment for a brief moment in space and time to read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. When I figure out why, I’ll let you know. This music, though……. listen to this music.

Meanwhile, here's a cock attacking a peacock.

The peacock won.

Life After Bleep

 The last five years have been a ride... a ride in a Jeep, a blue Jeep named Bleep. The exotic places it got me made for great stories, but generally the stories were about how I and the model survived it breaking down, or some Jeep related mechanical error or quirk... like the illustrious death wobble. It has been 10 months since that ride's life was ended by a Ford Focus that drifted into my lane on CA-SR 74 and flipped me. The car I could afford to raplace it with, after paying back my boss for getting me the Bleep, was this little Toyota Yaris, partially because I demanded that my car have a sense of humor, referring to it as a tampon. I hate the color. I hate the automatic transmission. I hate the interest rate. Pretty much everything about this car I hate. But, I love that I may be one of the few souls on the planet who purchaced a Toyota "Yaris" because its name is derived from the Greek, Charis, which was the name of Weston's muse, a la Wilson. I imagine most who drive a Toyota Yaris have no idea who Edward Weston was, or understand his contribution to photography, much less the connection between his story and my own. The adventures have been a lot less... adventurous... but the story remains beautiful in my little mind.