The Ghost of Vik
My first love was music. Second: dance. The two go together divinitively (that’s a word now); as if they are one in the same. Now, I’m not talking about most of the music you listen to; I’m talking about real music that has spanned time. I am also not talking about the shameless flailing that you witness at concerts and clubs; I am talking about structured, trained, and disciplined dance. The origin of my love of music, specifically classical piano and strings, is as yet untapped in my buried consciousness. Maybe my father listened to it? Maybe I overheard the score of a television program or film that my parents took my baby ass to? Maybe I simply truly love vibration and frequency that makes up the vary fabric of life and existence? Regardless, the child me was incapable of just hearing, seeing, or feeling things; I wanted to do those things; which brings us to dance, more specifically, ballet. My uncle was the chief lighting engineer at the Music Center in DTLA, so we would often see productions there, very likely for free, considering the before and after show moments were frequently accompanied by strolls around the bowels and brains of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The shows were all over the place, obviously. There were symphonies and operas, which I absolutely loved (I also loved to sing, and through my teens won more awards for that than anything else).
There were theatre productions, musicals, and dance concerts, which were… ehn (I would ironically win more praise and awards for my work in theatre overall, even though I never really liked it). The specific moment I can trace my obsession back to happened when I was about 6 or 7, and my fragile little mind was graced with a production of Romeo and Juliet, the ballet, not the long winded, straight play (which would later become the show I won the most praise for and landed me in jail [oh so many connections and ironies]), and I fell in complete and absolute love with ballet. I never latched on to the specific dance company that performed it, but this was LA’s premier stage, so at very least the best LA had to offer (I know, it’s not NY). I went home completely changed, and demanded that I study ballet. My mother, in my half-assed, at her convenience, childhood, enrolled me in fucking tap-dance. I hated it, for good fucking reason. I did the stupid classes, learned the stupid routine, and performed in the chaotic children's concert at the auditorium where I would’ve gone to high school had my parents not moved me to this backward little mountain town.
I was the only boy on stage, and the concert also included slightly older kids doing ballet, which fucking pissed me off more. I was basically forced to give up on dance, like being choked forces you to give up on breathing. A decade later I would find myself in a high school show choir, which existed because of my love of music, not because of the cheesy dancy bit… I fucking hated that, too. About that time I was forced into doing the dumbed down lyrical dance that existed in musical theatre, which would become the standard for the next decade of my life, even though I didn’t like that either. I suffered dance for my love of music, even though most theatre music turns my stomach. After taking a year off from stage, I found myself back in my little mountain town, attending the nearest college, and, having been cast as a featured dancer in a musical production, found myself as a functioning member of a dance department. Not only would those studio rooms eat my life away for years, but after shooting a dance concert in 1997, with a shitty, stolen point and shoot (as an audience member, using my knee as a tripod), I began to really study photography, using all the bodies I had access to in the dance department as creative guinea pigs. While I should have been overjoyed with such an opportunity, I was limited, like everything else in my life, to what I had access to. This was not a typical dance department, but a modern dance department, id est, there was no ballet anything, but grand, and mostly mundane, ‘movement for the sake of movement’.
I certainly made the most of it and accumulated a sizable body of decent work, getting better with the low light with each concert I shot, but what I really wanted to be doing was still eluding me. I continued to shoot concerts even after I was no longer in the dance department, 12 years all together, and by the end I was inviting dancers to shoot with me off the stage, which was met with a lot of enthusiasm, to my surprise. I got some decent work, as per what my life was always reduced to, but all I was really getting in relation to the beauty I wanted to capture was, forgive me if I accidentally insult anyone I’ve worked with, boring shit. Any fine art nude photographer out there, who has a realistic grasp on what actually defines fine art, likely knows exactly what I mean: nudity is not a requirement; not being afraid of nudity IS; and 99.9% of the people I worked with in this environment were absolutely terrified of being real, so I was, as I’m sure you can imagine, miserable.
At some point I gave up on shooting dance the way I wanted, which was really relative to basic common sense to me: you are using your body; but you’re afraid of your actual body; that is a conundrum that makes my fucking brain hurt.
Fast forward to when Vik hit my radar: studied ballet while growing up in Austria, lived in New York, dancing, and also working as a nude model… classically trained and not afraid to be natural… that put her on a very short list of souls that I really wanted to work with. Don’t get me wrong, there are a bunch of models out there that I would love to work with, but a lot of them are good enough models that are somewhat extraordinary, but kind of just like all the other models, which means that in my world, where I don’t have the money to succeed, and especially in my current situation, supporting a family of four, I simply cannot waste money on just another model.
Vik had a skillset and lack of fear that I had been wanting to shoot my entire life, so I made it happen. The shoot itself has already been written about, and while I do have a few silly regrets regarding the shoot, I don’t regret meeting or working with her at all.
While I do consider everyone who has graced my camera and creative madness as friends, I haven't really kept in touch with this one. She contacted me late last year about shooting while she was in L.A., but I was in San Diego with my girls, having our little Eroica. That was my convenient excuse, but I was already panicking about being the sole provider for a family of four. I have been following her accomplishments from a far. Recently she found herself in the hospital. Basically, she should be dead. Then she came out with a new lease on life and began talking candidly about her eating disorder, and the kind of shit she had to deal with in her life (links below).
We are pretty proud of her strength and endurance. I wanted this post to be more about the eating disorder bit, but I apparently needed to ramble on about how much I loved dance (I really needed you to understand that). I believe that most have something resembling an eating disorder, that's what society does to us to make money. I often joke about being a fat kid, when I wasn't really fat, I was just a big, Amish kid. I have, however, starved myself most my life to stay somewhat thin, which seems silly to write down because "men" aren't supposed to feel like that.
Obviously, training in ballet and pursuing modeling brings with it an entirely different list of expectations, so I don't relate to that, but I can tell you that the primary reason I never pursued acting is because I didn't have a Hollywood body (or modeling, which was recommended a number of times). I even worked out 3-5 times a week for a couple years when I was younger to alleviate the problem, but I was also starving myself, so I was actually getting fatter; thinner, yes, but fatter. Then there was the whole 2012 fiasco, where I almost starved myself to death and the hospital wouldn't release me until I made them promises. I've talked to a couple people in interviews about body image, and mentioned that I grew up with the same body ideals as everyone else. Women are expected to be skinny; men are expected to be strong; unless you're a rock star, then you're heroin skinny. In all honesty, when I was standing next to Vik with a camera, on that freezing April morning, I saw strength and discipline. I capture what people give me, so I have to assume that regardless of whether you are underweight or overweight, you are presenting yourself to the world the way you want to be seen. I completely respect that. It is also none of my damn business how people choose to live their lives. I work with adults, who are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. It wasn't until I got home and looked at the photos that I realized how thin she really was...like she didn't look healthy thin. I only used a select few photos and never really went through them again.
I didn't want anyone to think that this was the ideal I was looking for or celebrating. The discipline and grace of dance, yes, but I try to teach people that it is strength that brings that, not frailty, so I was faced with a bit of a conundrum. Not that she didn't have the strength, but it doesn't take much strength to support 75 pounds of body, to be blunt. A bulk of her work is in studio and in costume, too, which gives you a little leeway to hide things. Outdoor nudes don't give you much leeway. So, anywhoo, oh how I ramble. Here's her links. Read her blog posts and send her some love.
No comments:
Post a Comment