Cambodian Wedding

I haven’t made a posting for nearly a week, as I’ve been busy 1) trying to get my apartment straightened up, and 2) waiting for back to feel 100% again. (I’m still waiting, though it does feel better now.)

As for this weekend, I’ve been doing things like shopping, laundry, watching the Mets beat the Yankees, etc. I had thought of getting back to filing more of my Tibet photos, but I think I’ll wait a bit longer for my back to get better before tackling that again. I was thinking of trying to get back to exercising by walking the stairs in my building again today (and I may still be able to do it), but I do have a lot of other stuff to do around here, including finally filling out the paperwork and prepping the photos for the Artful Nude exhibit in Colorado this summer.

I haven’t posted any travel photos for a while, and none from Cambodia since I returned from there a couple of months ago, so today will be the day that I do. Rather than putting up some photos taken across Cambodia in general, today’s images are from something specific.

The afternoon that my group visited the great temple of Angkor Wat (just one of many places in the overall Angkor area, by the way), we encountered a wedding party that was leaving the temple as we were departing, too. I don’t know if the wedding ceremony was actually held at the temple or if they just went there to have some photos taken. Either way, it was an interesting thing to see.

Cambodia is a very poor country, but it would seem that if people can afford to splurge for something important like a wedding, they do it. The bride was decked out in white with a lot of jewelry (though perhaps a bit too much makeup). The groom and his men were wearing bright white suits. The bridesmaids were wearing white and green and they all appeared to be having a ball, laughing amongst themselves and with others. (I even got one to pose with me for one of my arm’s length self-portraits – though her attention is obviously focused elsewhere!) The bride, on the other hand, seemed very serious the whole time.

I managed to get just one photo of the wedding party with my film camera (as I had just one shot left on the roll and no time to re-load), but I was able to get a few with my little digital camera. I think the best of the photos was the last one that I took, which is the one posted at the top – the bride and groom about to get into their car.

However, I have to say that my personal favorite photo of the bunch was the one I made next to last and that’s posted at the bottom here: the newly minted husband giving his bejeweled bride a drink from a bottle of water. In a place as hot as Cambodia, even brides need to make sure they stay hydrated!

A Few More Sips of Champagne

I had planned this weekend to finally get to work once again filing negatives from my trip to Tibet, but that hasn’t happened. My back went out on me last Thursday as it does from time to time, and as it’s still hurting, I really didn’t feel like being hunched over a table filing negatives and annotating pages for several hours, which is what I’d had in mind. (Someone at my office noted on Friday that from the way I was walking, it looked like I’d just gotten off of a horse.)

So, I decided to go back into the negative archives and scan some more images from my photo session with Carlotta Champagne out in the Nevada desert a couple of years ago. It’ll likely be some time until the film from my studio session with her last month will be developed, so I thought I’d post these “oldies” here today.

Actually, my bad back is just the latest in a series of things that have been bothering me over the past month and a half. Thankfully, though, it looks like the other problems will be resolved before too long. I went for an endoscopy yesterday (it’s strange seeing photos of your own stomach, etc.) and the doctor says that what’s been ailing me is nothing to really worry about. I’m someone who has a history of suffering of from anxiety over medical procedures, and while I felt a bit nervous, it was nothing overwhelming and the whole thing was reasonably painless.

So, I’m hoping that once that’s taken care of and my back returns to normal (and it is getting slowly better, as it usually does when this happens), I’ll be able to get around a bit more and do more things.

I actually had a photo shoot planned for outdoors today with a model named Stephanie Anne, but as it’s rainy, windy and chilly, we decided to opt for a postponement. I supposed it’s just as well, given how I’ve been feeling. If the weather were good I would have gone ahead with the shoot, but perhaps it’s just as well that I’ll have time for my back to get better before dragging my camera gear around again.

This blog entry is also something of a milestone. While it is not my 100th blog posting overall, it is the 100th entry that I’ve written from home (not counting the ones I’ve done while on my travels). I always write up my postings first in MS Word and save them numerically, so that’s how I know that this is number 100. Let’s see how many more I can do over the coming years.

The 8 O’Clock Rule

I just saw a segment on the nightly network news broadcast regarding how much people are crunched for time today. With multi-tasking, people now do 31 hours worth of work in 24 hours, it said. The downside, of course, is that the more you do in any given stretch of time, the less quality you achieve with each thing.

That news segment was rather coincidental, as I was planning to write today about managing my time and something I have dubbed “the 8 o’clock rule.” I may be good at photography (or so some people tell me), but I really need to work at managing my time better. One of the problems is sitting here in front of me: my computer. I guess I’m not the only one who can sit down and find that hours have gone by and at which point you ask yourself, “What have I accomplished?”

So, I have set a goal for myself: to be finished with all of my internet business for the day (including wasting time surfing around) by 8 p.m. After that, it’ll be time for other things: relaxing in front of the TV watching a video or a ballgame, developing film, filing negatives or even using the computer to scan negatives. I also want to finish off things like paying bills before 8, too. I’ll also continue to check my e-mail and such things briefly before going to bed each night.
So far, in the few days that I’ve implemented this, I’ve been pretty successful. Let’s hope that I can keep up with it. I’ve recently switched to a new e-mail account because of the avalanche of spam I’m getting out the old one, and that takes up time, too.

By the way, the photo at the top was made at a workshop in Woodstock, New York, a couple of years ago.

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I read with sadness today that a photographer named Yuri Bonder died a week ago at the very young age of 41. I really didn’t know much about him, other than that he lived in Israel and had apparently moved there from Russia or another part of the former Soviet Union. All I knew about him were the photos that he posted on Deviant Art – and they were great. Yuri excelled at both nudes and portraits (the latter both formal and on the street) as well as things like landscapes.

I think I once sent him a message on Deviant Art saying that if I ever were to visit Israel again, I would want to try to meet him. I never received a response, but now the point is moot. That meeting will never happen. An excellent photographer is gone – and as a photo of his son is prominently displayed on his DA main page, obviously a father, too. My thoughts go out to his family.

You can view Yuri’s Deviant Art page at http://yuribonder.deviantart.com/ and his website at http://www.yuribonder.com/?lng=eng .

I don’t normally post other photographers’ work on my blog here, but in this case I think it is appropriate. You can see a few of his photos below.

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PS The time on my computer now reads 8:00 p.m. Just in time, I guess.

Suicide Attempt

One of my mother’s best friends died two days ago. From what I understand, she died from ailments related to her having been a long-time cigarette smoker. She was not very old – just 61 years of age. What a senseless loss. Still, I suppose she was lucky in a way. One of my aunts died from lung cancer from having smoked cigarettes. She was only 48 years old at the time.

And still, despite people dying like this every day, millions and millions of people continue to pollute their bodies and destroy themselves with this shit we call tobacco.

Of course, people who smoke say things like “My uncle Joe smoked three packs a day and he lived to be 95.” Well, lucky for Uncle Joe – but so what? As it happens, today is May 4, 2008 – the first anniversary of my having been hit by a car last year.

That’s right. It was one year ago today that I was crossing the street when a car hit me, knocking me down and causing my head to smash into the ground so hard that I was knocked silly and had to be carted off to a hospital emergency room strapped down to a stretcher, half-choked by the neck restraint they put on me. What does this have to do with smoking cigarettes?

Like “Uncle Joe,” I was lucky. I got hit by a car but managed to escape with a couple of busted fingers and a concussion – not too bad, all things considered. So, just because I managed to get away lucky, does that mean that any of you out there would be willing to step in front of a moving car and get hit just for the fun or the thrill of it? Heck, there’d even be an insurance payment in it for you if you survived. (I got one.) Doesn’t the thrill and the potential for money make it worth giving it a try?

No, of course it doesn’t – but cigarette smokers go ahead and do the same thing every single day by lighting up. The question is: why? After all, people don't generally wake up in the morning and think to themselves, "I'm going to ingest arsenic just for the fun of it," so why should tobacco be different?

Not being a smoker, I can’t really say, but I think a lot of it has to do with image. I once heard that tobacco companies used to place beautiful and elegant looking women (maybe men, too) sitting in hotel lobbies smoking cigarettes to make cigarette smoking appear to be beautiful and elegant. You know: if you smoke cigarettes, you’ll be sexy, you’ll be beautiful, you’ll be hot, you’ll be cool.

Personally, I don’t see what’s so cool about being a patsy. That’s right, a patsy – to a bunch of tobacco company executives who are pissing in their pants with laughter as they happily stroll to the bank, knowing that they’ve hoodwinked you into spending your hard-earned money to buy a product that can bring you nothing but disease and death. (You think the cost of a pound of beef is high? Try figuring out how much a pound of cigarettes costs.)

Naturally, it’s more than just people sitting in hotel lobbies that get people started on smoking. Among other things are all of the films and still photographs made over the years (and that continue to be made) that make cigarette smoking appear to be something desirable. As far as I’m concerned, every single photographer, filmmaker and image maker of any kind who has made cigarette smoking look cool, hot, sexy or attractive in any way has got the blood of thousands on their hands – and if anybody has died as a result of their imagery they can spend eternity burning in the fiery pit of Hell!!!

As for my image at the top here, I can remember how it was made. I was at a workshop in Tuscany ten years ago and we were photographing a local girl, Beatrice. Someone asked her to light up a cigarette – and I was so furious that I stormed out of the room in anger. How dare someone put somebody else at risk like that for the sake of a photograph? Yes, I’m pretty sure that the girl was a smoker, but I would no more give a cigarette to a smoker than I’d give a stiff drink to an alcoholic. If they want to destroy themselves, we don’t need to encourage it.

At first I refused to take a photograph of the girl smoking, but then I relented. I took a few photos of her that way – but only on the condition that if I ever displayed one, I would give it the title “Suicide Attempt,” because that’s what I consider smoking to be. I have never shown it until now, so at last I’m able to follow through with my intention. (Fortunately, most of the photos I made of Beatrice - some of which you’re seeing here, too - were without the cigarette.)

Then there are those people who are afraid to quit smoking for fear of gaining weight after quitting. I once saw a poster at a store in Berlin, Germany, that addressed that pretty well. "Smoking makes you skinny" the poster said (in German, of course) and it showed a picture of a skeleton.

Ultimately, I guess, it’s up to each individual to decide how suicidal his or her behavior should be. Even though governments ban other products as lethal as tobacco, people can smoke themselves to death just as they can drink themselves to death. The main thing is that I don’t have to be affected by their behavior, so as long as I don’t have to breath in the smoke from other people’s cancer sticks, I guess I can’t complain. That still doesn’t leave non-smokers like me totally unaffected, because we feel the pain and the loss when our friends and loved ones succumb to the murderous plans of the tobacco companies and those who support them.

Unfortunately, there are those who still aren’t able to complain – and it really upsets me to see parents smoking with their small children around them. (Not enough to poison themselves; they'll got to poison their kids, too.) Even though smoking indoors is now banned in many places, the outdoors is not necessarily safe, either. Just try walking down the street behind someone smoking a cigarette - or even worse, a cigar - and you’ll end up breathing in the whole stream of smoke (or so it feels).

Sir Walter Raleigh is credited with popularizing tobacco in England after his visits to the New World, so it’s ironic that John Lennon of all people should put it so well in the Beatles’ song, "I’m So Tired":

“I'm so tired, I'm feeling so upset

Although I'm so tired I'll have another cigarette

And curse Sir Walter Raleigh

He was such a stupid get.”

(For another blog posting on this subject, see the one by Fluffytek from last month: http://www.fluffytek.com/blog/2008/04/cigarettes-death-sticks-or-creative.html )

Six Days with Maria E.

As I wrote at the end of my most recent blog post last Thursday, the model Maria Eriksson had just arrived for a visit to New York and I had agreed to host her while she was here on her first visit to the city. This morning she left and is now in California. As I had predicted when I last wrote, the days she was here were fun.

Maria worked with other photographers in different parts of the city, but before she arrived she had set aside Monday of this week as a day to work with me. As Monday was a rainy and chilly day here in New York, we had no choice but to work in my makeshift home studio – and I readily admit that I’m still very much a novice when it comes to studio work. Still, it is something different from working outdoors and possesses different challenges.

Among the things that Maria had brought with her was an object that she had bought on a recent trip to Egypt: a reddish scarf decorated with silvery ornaments (for lack of a better term in my vocabulary). As this seemed like an interesting type of prop that I had never used before, I decided to spend most of my time photographing Maria using it – first with a light gray background and then with a black background. I thought that the Middle Eastern item would go well with Maria’s somewhat exotic look.

As my readers here should know, I use film exclusively for my serious work. However, I do like to make some color photos with my pocket digital camera to get some quick feedback as well as to post work here from new photo sessions. You can see some of these color images of Maria here now, but don’t hold your breath when it comes to seeing the film. (Including the seven rolls of Maria, I now have 52 rolls of film to develop – plus 25 from Tibet to file!)

One of the things I need to get over when doing studio work is the typical ‘model standing in front of the camera’ kind of shot. There are some horizontally oriented studio images here, and it was Maria’s idea to try them. We managed to get her stretched out on the black backdrop by putting together a couple of chairs beneath it (basically, covering the chairs with the backdrop.)

Another thing I tried for the first time was mounting one of the lights on the boom arm that’s part of my lighting kit. I’d used the boom once before for suspending some fabric, but this was the first time that I used it to have the light facing downward from above the model. You can see one of these photos (without the Egyptian scarf) here, too. I think this set-up has the potential for dramatic imagery.

As for Maria’s sightseeing, I took her to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Heights promenade. We later walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, where we visited the World Trade Center site, waited for two mintutes on line at the Empire State Building (before finding out that the wait to go to the observation tower was too long), walked through Times Square and Rockefeller Center, the lobby of the famed Waldork-Astoria hotel and then the great expanse of Grand Central Station. We also visited Central Park another day (where Maria noted at least one good spot for a nude photo) and had dinner Monday night at a kosher deli on Kings Highway here in Brooklyn – to try to give her a fuller New York City experience. That’s her in a photo with the triple decker sandwich she ordered.

Like I said, she’s in California now, continuing her US tour. If you’re a photographer in an area that she’ll be passing through, I highly recommend working with her. She’s a great model and a lot of fun to work with.

As for me, having Maria here as my guest for six nights, I am going to miss her. Even though I had worked with her last summer, I had still thought of her mostly as a friend of my friend Alex Ingram in Scotland. I think I can safely say that she’s now my own friend, too. I hope she returns to New York sometime soon.

Sightseeing:

At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

On the Brooklyn Bridge

In Central Park

With those sandwiches at the deli

A Professional Model

I like to tell people now and then that I used to be a professional boxer. That’s right, it’s true: I got paid for putting things in boxes (among other tasks). I did that while working in the summer of 1979 at a textile factory located in a loft building at the corner of Broadway and Franklin Street in lower Manhattan.

Of course, when one hears “professional boxer,” one thinks of a guy in a ring (or as Gorilla Monsoon used to call it, “the squared circle”) trying to beat his opponent’s brains out – not someone standing over a counter putting pillow covers destined for JC Penney into boxes (as I did).

On the other hand, what about “professional model”? Someone who gets paid to wear clothing (or in the case of nude models, nothing) for the purpose of being photographed, drawn or seen in some way by others – right??? Well, I can honestly say that I was a professional model in the meaning of the term that I just described. I even got paid an hourly rate.

“Okay, okay. There’s got to be a catch,” I can hear you saying. Well, I admit it. There is a catch: I only did it for one hour.

In the summer of 1978, when I was all of 19 years old, I had a job working for a promotional firm on West 39 Street in midtown Manhattan. I was basically a gofer, as I recall (I can tell an amusing story about making the coffee every morning), and one time I was told to assist in making a small catalog for some camping gear the company was promoting. One of the things I remember that we had to do was to steam out the wrinkles in some of the bags to be photographed for the catalog - and we didn’t do a very good job of it, looking at the photos now.

A more interesting thing I was asked to do was to model a rain poncho – and hey, who was I to turn down an offer like that? I really don’t remember much from the photo shoot, other than that I got to take an hour off of work to go to the studio – and that I got paid $25 as a modeling fee, in addition to my regular salary. (So, I like to say that as a professional model I got paid $25 an hour – but I only did it for one hour.)

I still have two copies of the eight-page catalog and the photo above is scanned from its back page. The guy on the right is Wayne, one of the people I worked with at the firm. The pretty boys in the middle were hired from a modeling agency (and I have no idea what they got paid).

The guy on the left, of course, sporting the rain poncho and looking a bit like Jesus (or so I thought back then) is me.

And that, my friends, is the story of my career as a professional model. Like I said, that was in 1978. Little did I know at the time that being a professional boxer was just a year into my future.

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In more recent news, I drove to Kennedy Airport after worked today and picked up my friend, the beautiful model Maria Eriksson from the UK. She’ll be staying with me here for almost a week. This is Maria’s first visit to New York and though she’ll be doing some modeling (including getting in front of my camera), I’ll also be leading her on a sightseeing tour around town.

It should be fun.

Pictures at an Exhibition

I just took a look at my photography resume. This is something that mostly lists the exhibition and publication of my photography, plus things like awards and prizes that my photos have earned.

The last publication of my work was September of last year, with my eight-page feature in the premiere issue of Carrie Leigh’s NUDE magazine. That was less than a year ago, which is not too bad.

Exhibitions, though, are another story. The last time one of my photos was up on a wall somewhere for the public to see was in 2005, at the Community Zoe exhibit in Flagstaff, Arizona. That’s a long time ago – and the last time one was in a juried show was some years even further back.

Thankfully, that should be changing in several months. A number of weeks ago, I happened to notice (probably through something I saw in Camera Arts magazine) that the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, was having a call for work for an exhibition titled The Artful Nude. The juror was to be Kim Weston, grandson of the great Edward Weston and someone noted for his art nude work, too.

Well, I thought, this is something so obviously up my alley that I just have to submit some photos. Naturally, I nearly missed the April 8 deadline for on-line submission, but on that last day (even though I wasn’t feeling that well) I did send through five images along with my credit card number to pay the submission fee and also to become a member of the Center.

It’s a good thing I did find the time to sit down in front of my computer that day, as I found out a few days ago that my work was selected to be in the exhibition. According to the message I received, over 1,650 photos were submitted but only 54 were chosen. Not only that, I’m one of only four photographers to have two photos included in the show!

So, as you can imagine, I’m feeling pretty pleased right now.
As for the two photos chosen, you can see them here with this posting – and they were made under very different circumstances. The one at the top was made on a private photo shoot with a model at a ranch outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1998. The other photo was made the following year at a glamour-type group photo shoot in (of all places!) New Jersey.

Despite these differences, both images share one thing: they were both made late in the day with the sun very low in the sky, close to horizon. In the New Mexico image, the sun was behind me, and I chose to use it to project the model’s shadow on the wall of the adobe-style building. The model herself put her hand to her face to shield her eyes from the sun – and it looked so good to me that I just asked her to keep it there.

In the other image, the sun was not behind me but behind the model. This is something I like to do if I can, as I love the halo effect that appears around the model’s frame when this is done. I also like the way that she appears to be rising from the field of grass here, like the ancient goddess Demeter rising from the earth.

Fortunately, I’ve got both of these images printed (and matted) in both the 11x14 and 16x20 inch sizes. (Two of the five images I submitted were made during the past two years and have not yet been printed.) So, I’ll try to send in the bigger prints for the exhibition.

The show itself will be on the wall at the Center for Fine Art Photography from July 11 to August 9. The reception for the show will be held on Friday, August 1, from 6 to 9 pm at the Center, located at 400 North College Avenue in Fort Collins. I’m thinking of attending, but I haven’t yet decided.

Big T and The Boys

I returned home to New York this morning following several days in Las Vegas visiting family. The trip was actually somewhat in jeopardy on Friday, my departure day, as I spent quite a few hours that morning in the emergency room of a hospital here. As I wrote last week, I had not been feeling my best, and while I had definitely started feeling better for several days last week, that progress came crashing to an end Thursday night and Friday morning. Not wanting to take a chance of being stuck in a metal cylinder at 35,000 feet for over five hours Friday night while sick, I decided to go the emergency room. The prognosis was that I was able to travel – so I did.

Photographically, the highlight of my time in Las Vegas was going out on Sunday with my friend Terrell Neasley’s Las Vegas Art Model’s Group. As Terrell likes my photography, I thought I’d go out and lend whatever expertise and information I could that I’ve gathered in over a dozen years of photographing art nudes. At first I wasn’t going to bring a camera with me, both to lighten the load I’d need to schlep with me through the airports and to not take away any photo time from the participants who’d signed up. Terrell convinced me to bring it along and I’m glad I did, as these were the first outdoor nude photos I’d made since July of last year and the first in Nevada since 2006. I think that just getting out was good for me, considering how I'd been feeling.

Working with one model and a bunch of other photographers is never easy, so I decided to limit my camera time, though I did still shoot three rolls of BW 220 film. Having been at group shoot situations before, I know how difficult it can be to break away from the group to try something different, but I tried to do this at times and tried to encourage those there to do the same. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with starting out photographing models in a group, but eventually the time comes when it’s necessary to try to doing something more individual – even if it’s within a group situation.

The model, by the way, was a young woman with reddish hair and very beautiful eyes named Lydia. Perhaps I’ll be able to work with her again some time. As for the three rolls of film – well, they’ll have to wait until I develop the six rolls of Carlotta, which will have to wait until I develop the 36 from Southeast Asia, which will have to ….. (Will I ever have enough time to get caught up???)

To read about the event from Terrell’s point of view, read his blog posting here.

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I don’t normally write about the cars that I rent, but this trip was something different. Perhaps because my flight’s departure was delayed on Friday and arrived late into Las Vegas, most or all of the compact cars (the type of car I ask for) at the car rental agency were gone. So, I ended up driving around for four days in an Infiniti M35. I’m not normally impressed by such things, but I have to say that this was a very nice car, with beautiful leather seats and an engine that I could feel the power in when I stepped on the accelerator. (I am not used to coasting uphill for significant distances!)

The most unusual thing about this car was the ignition key. It didn’t have one. Instead, the entire remote control slides into the dashboard. I had never ever seen such a thing before, so I had to get out of the car and ask for help when I first got it and then had to call the emergency road service phone number the next morning just to find out how to start the engine!

Quickie

It’s been almost a week since my last posting, so I thought I’d better write something tonight.

To be honest, I have not felt that well for much of the past week, with Friday and Monday being particularly tough days – and yesterday and today I even wore a heart monitor. I have felt better the last couple of days (following three visits to two doctors, with another visit tomorrow) so I do feel like I’m on the mend, but as it’s getting late and I’m feeling kind of tired, I’ll keep this posting brief and hold off on my intended subject for a while longer.

I will say that I felt well enough on Saturday to meet and have lunch with Stephanie Anne, an attractive art model who lives in New York and who I hope to work with sometime this year.

Last but certainly not least, the photos I’m posting are of Iris Dassault, made during my visit to Michigan last summer. I hope to work with her again sometime this year, too.

Another Glass of Champagne

I had one of my most successful art nude photo sessions in June 2006, working with a model in the Nevada desert outside of Las Vegas. I really came back with a high percentage of keepers. (Five of the six most popular photos in my gallery at Deviant Art are from that one day, for example.) Maybe it was the location that was so great. Maybe I just felt very creative that day.

I can say with certainty, though, that much of the day’s success was due to the model I worked with, Carlotta Champagne. I’d wanted to work with her for some time, having been very impressed with the photos I’d seen of her. Having finally gotten to work with her and having seen the results, I of course wanted to do so again.

That finally happened last night. Carlotta is in New York for a couple of days, so she came over to work with me in my home studio set-up. This was the first time I’ve worked with a model since July of last year – eight months ago – and the first time that I’ve worked in my ‘studio’ in about a year and a half.

Whenever I work with a model after a long hiatus, I normally begin things by doing the tried and true. Last night was no exception, as I began working with Carlotta against a black background. Eventually, though, I began experimenting a bit, taping up a white piece of fabric (normally used to wrap around a model) on the backdrop holders’ crossbar to serve as a diffuse backdrop. I then placed one or both lights behind the fabric to illuminate it from behind.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of this photo session with Carlotta. Hopefully one day I (and you) will, but it’ll be a while. As I think I’ve written here already, I’ve already got 36 rolls from my trip to Southeast Asia to develop and file – and I probably won’t get started on that in earnest until I’ve finished filing most of the 25 rolls from Tibet that I still have to do!

For now, we’ll have to suffice with a few of the photos I made with my pocket digital camera last night. Some of these, as you can see, are just for fun – and I will say that Carlotta is a very pleasant person to work with (in addition to her having a great figure). It may be a while until I see the yesterday’s results, but I’m sure that I’ll want to work with her yet a third time.

Rachel

Today’s posting is a follow-up to my blog entry before last. In that one, I posted some photos of model and artist Rachel in her studio at home. They were made after a very long drive to her home in Maine from Prince Edward Island, Canada in the summer of 2006. We were both very tired, but we carried on with doing some more photography the best we could.

After I made the photos of Rachel surrounded by some of her artwork, I decided to try to make some photos that integrated Rachel with her artwork. I chose to do this by using the multiple exposure capability of my camera to double expose Rachel with some of her own artistic creations.

The photo you are seeing here was done entirely in camera and was scanned straight from the negative with no manipulation other than appropriate cropping. Rachel, obviously, is the larger figure. I probably wanted to get in closer to the drawing so it would match Rachel in scale, but I don’t think my lens was able to focus that close, so this is what I had to settle for. (I guess I could have tried to match Rachel to the drawing, but I might have tried that and felt it didn’t work. I just don’t remember.)

Still, I like it, and I think the criss-crossing of the figures work well. (I don’t know what others will think.) I also like way Rachel’s figure appears double exposed onto the canvas backing of the drawing. It seems to give her real figure a bit of a drawn quality, so perhaps this is something I’ll explore for future photographic usage.

I’ll post more photos from this session soon.

Once Again, Tibet

In the summer of 1988, the Olympic Games were held in Seoul, Korea. During this time, I remember that United Airlines ran a TV commercial highlighting its Far Eastern destinations – places like Korea, China, Japan, Singapore, the Phillipines, and so on, with people there wearing dazzlingly beautiful outfits.

“That looks really nice,” I thought to myself. “I should try visiting the Far East rather than just keep going to Europe year after year.” So it began, and Asia was in my mind as a place to visit. I had narrowed it down to either Japan or China for the next year, and ultimately chose China, as a trip there was the less expensive.

That trip that I chose also included a number of days in Tibet, as I’d been fascinated by that place up on high. Finally I was going to see it – or so I thought. The very next day after I made my tour payment to my travel agent, the New York Times had a front page headline which basically read: “China Declares Martial Law in Tibet.” One week later, the other shoe fell. My trip was cancelled due to an uprising by Tibetans against the Chinese who occupied their land.

Now, nearly 19 years later, the Tibetans have risen up once again in protest. The Chinese, of course, can’t admit that the cause of the unrest is their failed policy of religious and cultural repression in Tibet, so they’ve been laying the blame on Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who has openly renounced violence.

I finally made my trip to Tibet last year and saw both the beauty of the land and the beauty of the people in their spiritual devotion. Try as the Chinese may, the Tibetans refuse to let their Buddhist beliefs – and their devotion to the Dalai Lama – fade away. In the Barkhor area – the Tibetan section of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa - hundreds of pilgrims, prayer wheels in hand, still walk the ceremonial circuit around the sacred Jokhang Temple. Pilgrims also walk the circuit around and prostrate themselves in devotion in front of the Potala Palace, the Dalai Lama’s former residence.

(The photos posted here show monks in Samye Monastery, the oldest in Tibet, a woman I met at Trandruk Monastery and a girl who I came across just outside.)

Notice that I wrote “the Tibetan section of the Tibetan capital.” This would be like saying “the Italian section of Rome” or “the French section of Paris” or, indeed, “the Chinese section of Beijing.” The ideas seems ridiculous – all of Paris is French, of course – but in Lhasa it isn’t ridiculous, as most of the city is yet another Chinese place populated by Chinese shops and people. With the influx of Chinese into Tibet, Tibetans are becoming a minority in their own land, with most of the economic opportunities there going to the Chinese, from what I’ve read. (I couldn’t ask any Tibetans this, of course, as we were warned of the dire consequences that would befall a Tibetan for speaking out on such things.)

Likewise, religious freedoms are being denied. While pilgrims may walk around the Barkhor and the Potala, students and government employees are prohibited from being practicing Buddhists. Someone wanting to become a monk must be vetted by the Chinese to make sure that he has no family involved in anti-Chinese activities. The Chinese impose limits on the number of monks that each monastery may have, and they are forced to undergo Communist indoctrination and to renounce their allegiance to the Dalai Lama. (That would be like a Roman Catholic priest being forced to renounce allegiance to the Pope and the Vatican.) It’s no wonder that the Tibetans are angry that their world is being taken away from them.

(Meanwhile, as the Chinese continue to suppress the Tibetans, the nearby Himalayan Buddhist kindgom of Bhutan just became the world's newest democracy. It just had its first ever elections and is now a constitutional monarchy, having been previously been ruled by its kings with absolute power.)

I’ve been trying to come up with something comparable to the 1950 Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 comes to mind, but as Tibet has no oil, nobody really cared about Tibet. I think a better example is the Roman occupation of ancient Israel during and after the time of Jesus – a case of an invader building roads and public works but doing so for its own benefit and seeking to suppress and destroy the local culture. The Israelites rose up against the Romans several times, just as the Tibetans have risen up against the Chinese.

This year the Olympics are to be held in Beijing, and the Chinese want to put on a good show, showing the world that their land is one big happy place with one big happy family. If only it were true. So far, Steven Speilberg has resigned as artistic advisor in protest over the Chinese government’s support of the genocidal regime in Sudan. Champion distance runner Haile Gebreselassie has said that he won’t run in the marathon because the air in Beijing is too polluted. Now the unrest in Tibet shows the world how happy Tibetan people really are.

I guess that there are two ways to see to it that your people appear to be living harmoniously. The first is that you can actually make an effort to create harmonious living conditions. The other way is to tell your people, “Be harmonious – or else!!!” It’s obvious that with its campaign of repression the Chinese have chosen the latter method.

Now there’s talk of some countries boycotting the opening ceremonies at the Olympics. On the News Hour earlier this week, some Tibet experts warned that doing so would likely inflame the Chinese even more, put strains on China’s relations with the west and would cause the Chinese to punish Tibet even more. Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with China, it seems to be a case of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.’

Or, it could just be China’s way of saying to the world, “Be harmonious with us – or else!”

Future Thoughts

I’ve decided to do a post with some more nudes today, so here are some photos I made in August 2006 of a model named Rachel. As well as being a good figure model, Rachel is also a highly accomplished artist, so I decided to photograph her in her home studio surrounded by her creations.

Actually, these photos were kind of difficult for both of us to do. We had just arrived at Rachel’s home in Maine following a drive of about eight hours from Canada’s Prince Edward Island, where we had spent the previous week at a workshop. I think we were both pretty much dead tired at this point, but I wanted to take some photos of Rachel with her artwork, so we just soldiered on through.

The photos here show Rachel surrounded by her artwork – pretty standard stuff, for the most part. (Like I said, we were both kind of out of it – and I still had to get in my car and drive another hour or so to get to my hotel.) Besides these photos, though, I also tried to do some more creative work involving Rachel and her artwork. I’ll be posting some of those images in figure entries here.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

One of the reasons I’m posting these photos now is that I’m thinking over how to spend my vacation time for the rest of the year. Typically for me, I’ve just returned from one trip and immediately I begin to plan the next one (and the one after that, etc.). Being that I’m interested in seeing more of Asia, I was pretty sure that I’d try to go on a trip to Lakakh this summer. Ladakh is a Himalayan region of northern India where most people practice Tibetan Buddhism, and I think it will be an interesting follow-up to my trip to Tibet last year. Plus, I’ve never been to India.

Still, I find myself getting caught up in the dichotomy of being someone who photographs both foreign lands and nudes. Given that I have only so much vacation time, how should I use that time? Like I said, I was pretty set on India, but now I’m beginning to waver.

My recent trip to Southeast Asia followed up on my trip to Tibet in August of last year. That’s two trips to Asia in a little over half a year. On the other hand, I have not photographed any nudes since July, so I’m thinking that it’s time to let the pendulum swing the other way for a while.

One of the things I’m considering strongly is a road trip back to maritime Canada – Nova Scotia, to be more specific. There’s an excellent photographer of nudes up there named Eric Boutillier-Brown and I’ve been hoping to get up there to meet him and do some photography. I wrote to him recently and he responded very positively. Another reason for a trip that way is that I should have the chance to work with Rachel again as I pass through Maine.

I’ve also been in touch with Sarah Ellis, who has got to be one of my all-time favorite models to work with. She’ll be in San Francisco until the end of June and she suggested I go out there to work with her. She said she knows lots of good locations – so why not? I’ve not been to San Francisco since 1999, so this would be a good opportunity for a return visit. Maybe I can combine it with a few days in the Los Angeles area to meet up with some people I know down there. I’m also trying to arrange a photo shoot with an LA model who interests me.

Otherwise, it looks like I may finally have my chance to work with Carlotta Champagne once again when she's here in New York next week, so the 'nude drought' may be coming to an end. The other thing I want to do is to attend the Community Zoe fine art nude photographer and model get-together in September near Palm Springs in September. If I do get to go on all of these trips I’m considering, by the time 2009 rolls around I should really be hankering to get back to Asia again!

Old and Wet

It’s been a few weeks since I posted any nudes here, having devoted the space here during the past few weeks to my recent trip to Southeast Asia. I will continue with that later.

For now, it’s back to nudes. As always, the question is, “What should I post?” Lately it’s been mostly recent photographs, but today I decided to try something different. I went into the closet, pulled out a binder box holding about a hundred pages with negatives, and decided to scan a couple of frames to post here.

The resulting scans are the two watery images you see here. I made these images at a workshop in upstate New York in 1998. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been photographing nudes so long that these photos are now nearly ten years old – and I’d been photographing nudes for three years when I pressed the shutter release for these.

Actually, I have been thinking about my old negatives lately. I’ve been thinking of putting together a book project that will be something of a retrospective of my nude photography ‘career,’ and in order to do that I’ll have to go through all of the pages with nude photos that I’ve accumulated. Perhaps this is a first step toward that end.

Photos from Laos

I returned home safely from my trip to Laos and Cambodia late Saturday night. Thankfully, everything on the trip and the flights went pretty well, though I did return home with a bad back (from sitting too long on the plane?) and a bad stomach (from who knows what). Thankfully these things didn’t effect me while I was away, and luckily I’ve had two days off to recover before returning to work tomorrow.

Overall, I shot 36 rolls of BW film on the trip, but it’ll be a while until I can get the film developed, organized and scanned. As it is, I still have 25 rolls of film from Tibet to organize and scan (and I do feel very badly about what’s going on over there now).

As it’ll be awhile until I can post any of my BW photos, I’ve decided to post a series of photos made with my pocket Canon digital camera. These are higher resolution photos that I was unable to post while I was away as the file sizes are too large to upload without being edited down first (which I can do here but not on the road).

So, here we go. Highlights of my trip to Laos:

1. The sun on the horizon as seen from my flight to Hong Kong (above).

2. The dog ‘driving’ the motorbike that I mentioned on my first posting from Vientiane.

3. Some kids on the street in Vientiane.

4. A beautiful young woman who runs a fabric shop in Vang Vieng. I purchased something from her store.

5. Some seriously cute kids at a minority village we stopped at on the road north.

6. An elderly woman with a wonderful face, also in an ethnic minority village.

7. Palm trees at Wat Visunalat in Luang Prabang.

8. Monks in Luang Prabang doing their early morning rounds of collecting food donations from people – the food that they’ll eat during the day.

9. Kids at a ‘village book party’ – part of a book donation program by an organization called Big Brother Mouse.

10. An adorable face at another minority village.

11. I guess they wanted to make sure people knew where the bombs came from.

12. Glamming it up at the Plain of Jars (a place I wrote about previously).

13. Culture clash: sarong by Laos, socks by Adidas.

14. Detail of a young monks attire in Vientiane – orange robe, yellow sash, blue shoulder bag.

15. Hmong women who run a shop at the market in Vientiane.

16. Boarding the early morning Lao Airlines flight to Cambodia.

Yeah, maybe I should have split this posting of photos into two parts, but what the heck – here they are. The truth be told, I had actually planned to post photos from Cambodia today, too! Those other photos will wait for another day.

And for those of you hoping to see photos of naked women, I’ll try to post some of those here next time. Stay tuned.

Phnom Penh

March 14, PHNOM PENH - Well, here I am again, sitting in a hot, sweltering corner of the lobby of my hotel in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. (The rest of the lobby is nicely air-conditioned, so obviously the blowers are facing the other way.)

It's nighttime now, and I've now spent three days here in the capital. To my surprise, this actually seems like a nice city in the looks department. Although I'd read that it's the best looking of the cities built by the French during their colonization of Indochina, I still expected it to look rather shabby, but it actually looks pretty good, with fairly new looking buildings, lots of golden temple spires and a good amount of open areas.

It's also much, much larger than Vientiane, the capital of Laos. In Vientiane you could pretty much walk to any place you'd want to go. Not so with Phnom Penh. While Vientiane was a rather quiet place, this city has a much greater buzz to it. That buzz is composed of things like cars and motorbikes wizzing by, tuk-tuk drivers continually asking you if you want a ride to somewhere, beggars asking for money, kids asking you if you want to buy one of the books that they're hauling around (even while you're sitting and eating dinner) and - as was directed at me while walking to and from dinner tonight - propositions for the sale of marijuana and girls. (I think both Chinese and Cambodian were on offer for the latter.)

Our touring of the city began two days ago with a visit to the Royal Palace. I'd read that it had been modeled upon the palace in Bangkok, so I expected it to be a pale imitation of the royal palace in the Thai capital. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by a series of very beautiful and very elegant buildings. Not only that, it's also a lot less croweded with tourists than the one in Bangkok, so overall I'd give the nod to the palace here if I had to choose which of the two I like best.

I also went to Wat Phnom, the hilltop temple that was founded hundreds of years ago by a woman named Penh (for whom the city is named) and the National Museum, which houses a collection of beautiful sculpture produced by the Khmer empire of Cambodia.

Yesterday, however, was an altogether different experience. If the great temples that I visited at Angkor a few days ago represented the high point of Cambodian civilization - the great Khmer empire - then the places we saw yesterday represented its lowest point: the so-called "Zero Years" of the Khmer Rouge. These Cambodian communists under the leadership of Pol Pot set out to systematically destroy the entire history of Cambodian culture - and they killed a large percentage of the Cambodian population with it from 1975 to 1978. Phnom Penh was emptied and turned into a ghost town. If you were anything other than a farmer or a peasant, you were destined for execution. The Khmer Rouge revolution left no place for intellect.

The first place we visited was the Touel Sleng prison. This former school was the Khmer Rouge's chief detention and interrogation center, and only seven of the thousands of people who passed through its doors survived. From the outside it looks like an ordinary place, fronted by palm trees, but inside some of the greatest crimes ever committed took place. One can see some of the cells, but much of the space is taken up by photographs of the victims - men, women and children - systematically made by their captors. Again, everyone just looks so ordinary, like the Cambodians one sees today - the people working in the hotels, the shops and the restaurants, the monks in the temples, the children walking to and from school. I imagined the people in those photos as the people I've seen here in Cambodia this week and the enormity of it all began to sink in. The only crime of which the photographed people were guilty was that of being born and having lived in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Still, not all of the people who suffered are gone. Our tour guide, who was a child during those years, explained to us that his father and two sisters were killed during that period of national insanity, and you could easily see and hear him becoming very emotional and on the verge of tears while talking about it. I imagine that it must be very difficult for him to continually return there with tour groups to have to re-live the nightmare again and again.

After the prison we were taken 15 kilometers outside the city to the "killing fields" of Choueng Ekm where thousands of Khmer Rouge victims were bludgeoned to death, with loud music playing on speakers to mask what was happening from nearby villagers. Again, on appearance, the place seems rather ordinary - just a field. This particular field now has a number of open pits to indicate where mass graves were found. There is also a temple-like structures continuing the skulls of hundreds of victims found there. One can just hope that it will bring some peace to the souls of the departed.

In reading up on Cambodian history before the trip, I was somewhat suprised - though not completely surprised - to learn that after the Khmer Rouge fled into the jungle following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia (after Cambodia had attacked Vietnam), Pol Pot and his mass-murdering colleagues were actually supported by the Unites States government and its allies! (Yep, there's nothing wrong with supporting a bunch of genocidal mass murderers if it's all done to protect our national interest - right???)

As for Cambodia today - well, things seem to be getting better, but there's obviously a long way to go. After being ruled by an American-supported military government, the Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge and the Russian-supported Vietnamese, the Cambodians finally have their future in their own hands. Unfortunately, the hands that run the government seem to spend a lot of time lining their own pockets, as corruption is rampant, and much of the improvements here are apparently being made by non-governmental organizations. It's pretty sad when you see kids having to bother tourists morning, afternoon and night to sell books - and according to something I read at a restaurant where I ate today, these kids are just being exploited and really don't even benefit themselves from what they're doing. Still, thngs are obbiously much better than they were before.

The tour officially ended after breakfast this morning, so after breakfast I took a nice walk with some of the other tour people who were flying out tonight. In the afternoon I made an hour long visit to Wat Ounalom, a large temple close to the hotel, and spent some time speaking (in English) with some of the monks there. One of them even got a key and opened up one of the sanctuaries for me to see. Two other people on the tour left later tonight - I even let them use the shower in my room to get cleaned up before their flight - so now I'm the only one from the group left here in town. My turn to leave will be tomorrow morning.

So, overall, it's been a very enjoyable journey here to southeast Asia. The rest of the world has undergone some major changes while I've been away, I've seen. The governor of the State of New York is resigning due to a sex scandal involving prostitution and, right here in Asia, there has been another outpouring of protests in Tibet (and elsewhere) against its continued occupation by the Chinese. I guess I'll find out more about it all after I return home tomorrow night. (I just wonder how many movies I'll watch on the flight home.)

Be well, everyone.

Dave

Angkor

March 11, SIEM REAP - Hi again, everyone.

I'm now writing to you from Siem Reap in Cambodia, where I arrived from Laos two days ago. I can describe the weather with two words: very hot.

Siem Reap is something of a touristic boom town, with new hotels, shops and apartments going up to add to the many that are here already. The advantage of this city is it's close proximity to the great temples of Angkor, built by the Khmer empire nearly a thousand years ago. It is for visiting these places that so many people come here.

Mention the name 'Angkor' to many and they will think of just one thing: Angkor Wat. While it's true that Angkor Wat is one of the main attractions of the area, it is but one of many fascinating places to see.

Yesterday our touring started out with what has been my favorite ancient site so far: the temple of Ta Prohm. This is an amazing place, not just for it's design and decoration but for the fact that it's been taken over by the Cambodian jungle, with huge spung trees spreading their roots over the ancient structures. This is one of the major sites to see at Angkor, and after Ta Prohm we visited two more: Angkor Thom and its Bayon temple, followed by Angkor Wat.

The Bayon is a place with huge faces of the king Jayavarman, in whose reign it was built, staring out from huge collars in four directions. Angkor Wat is the most complete of the ruins at Angkor, with wonderful wall reliefs depicting action from the Indian tale of the Ramayana, which is very popular here and in Laos and Thailand.

Today we visited Banteay Sray, a temple made of red sandstone and possessing very fine carvings, and Preah Khan, another fascinating place with the jungle taking over. In the afternoon we took a boat ride on the Tonle Sap lake to see how people live on the water.

To me, this trip is really just an introduction to these places. Photographically, things at Angkor have not been easy. Even though we've left our comfortable hotel at 8 a.m. each day, by the time we get out to the sites the sun has been rather high in the sky and a lot of other tourists have been there, each one of course wanting to pose in front of the very thing that I've been wanting to photoraph. As the day wears on and the sun gets higher, things get worse. I don't think I got any good images of the giant faces at the Bay