A Long Walk

No shooting today, so I had a little time to take care of a few things I've been meaning to do. I mean I'd rather be shooting, but the to do list was getting a little ridiculous. But it's not all work either. I've been managing a good long walk every day, sometimes two and it's been feeling very good on a number of fronts.

First, it's good for me. Very good for me. I can do three miles at a stretch without even blinking. Must have started with all of that walking in Paris. I'm going through a lot of lotion on my feet to keep them happy, but it's been a nice thing to do for myself every day.

I've been walking to and from places I never would have dreamed of a few months ago. Better for me than a cab. Plus I've been getting a very good look at this city of mine. Seems like since I'm such a visual person, it's silly for me not to take the time to view it at 3mph like I would if I were exploring a great city in Europe. I've been finding lots of places that would serve as good locations for this fashion project I'm working on with my muse. It's getting chilly out there, but 15 minutes here or there, I think we can handle. Maybe.

So I'm feeling good physically and mentally these days, although it seems like there is a lot of pain out there going on with a few very close friends of mine. I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking to and about them. Sometimes I feel like I can help and sometimes I just feel a bit helpless. Sometimes I feel like I am not the answer, but it's hard for me to disengage sometimes. I've been thinking a lot on these long walks. Seems like a good thing to do. Gives me some time to sort through everything.

I walked five miles tonight. Ended up downtown and took in a movie called Good Night, And Good Luck. It's really quite a timely film. David Strathairn plays television newsman Edward R. Murrow who took on Senator Joe McCarthy in the 50s when the Senator was bullying the citizenry in the name of national security.
If it sounds somehow familiar in terms of what we are going through now in the name of national security, it is. George Clooney directs and stars in it as well. He's really starting to use his star power to do some good out there. I raise my glass to him.

And in terms of the photography of the film, it's beautiful. Black and white. Everyone is smoking and I'm afraid nothing looks quite as good on screen as cigarette smoke in B&W. Well, wait a minute. I can think of a bunch of things that look that good, but you get my point. Go see it, talk about it and pay attention to your news consumption. You are what you eat. Make sure it's not junk.

I'm continuing to get some of my art up on the walls here. It's about time, but I have to say it's tricky to pick the images. Seems I always need help with that, so it's going a little slowly. But the prints looks great and I'm having fun making them. It's nice to have a catalog of 35,000 images to choose from. And it's growing every week.

So I have some friends in a bit of pain these days and it makes me a little sad to know that. It's good that we have each other, even when we're in different cities or just across town. It's nice to have people to support you. It's nice to be supported. Sometimes it just takes a little time to yourself to help sort through things. I know my long walks help me.

Helmut Newton

I've been doing a lot of talking about my photography lately. I mean out loud. Lots of verbal conversations and computer chatting. I'm clearly working through a lot of ideas and putting myself in a position photographically where I'm not always sure of my footing as I click the shutter. I was talking to my muse the other night about it, saying that I feel a little like I did ten or fifteen years ago when I was trying to figure out what kind of photographer I wanted to be. I was experimenting a lot. Buying a lot of photography books.

But I think the most important difference between now and then is that I finally have a model to collaborate with who is as committed to shooting as much as possible as I am. We've started to really go over the more than one thousand photographs we've made in the last few weeks, seeing what has been working and what we want to go back and try again. It's really been an amazing process. I find myself very energized just thinking about it.

I had a few minutes this afternoon where I had the chance to look up a few books I've had on my list. When Helmut Newton died this year, I realized that two of my favorite photographers were gone in the last two years. Herb Ritts being the other. Both of them have been major influences on my work over the years. And even though my library has a large number of Herb Ritts books, I only have one on Helmut Newton.

So today I fixed that. Some were out of print and I ended up getting them from various booksellers all over the country. But in a few days, I'll be knee deep in the work of Mr. Newton. I'm looking forward to spending time studying his work up close. But it's not just his images that are intriguing to me, but his attitude about fashion and art and how he combined the two.

One of the books I will be getting contains some of his controversial work with Paris Vogue back in the 60s. Newton moved to Paris in 1957 and spent more than two decades shooting for the various editions of Vogue as well as the other major fashion magazines. Of course, his most interesting images were limited to the European magazines with their more healthy and open minded views of art. America was then and continues to be so repressed that Newton's images were dismissed as too shocking for public consumption, at least on their coffee tables.

Maybe that's why I felt so at home in Paris last month.

So as my muse and I continue on our photographic adventure, I'm looking forward to trying all the things we have on our list and things we haven't even thought up yet. We had her balancing on a thin piece of wall, eight feet up in the air during the last shoot in the middle of the night. We managed to make some interesting images even though we were a little skittish about her falling to the hard floor below if she lost her balance.

I think that's really what this has become for me. For us both. Being fearless. Trying things that may sound silly to say them out loud, but you can't argue with the results.

J'aime ma belle muse!


So again, we're not ready to reveal what we're working on just yet, but so that this is not a text only entry, here's a photograph I took of Basia in Montreal in 1996. We were shooting a commercial for Tresemme shampoo and Montreal was a stand-in for Paris. Basia, who still shows up in Victoria's Secret once in a while even though the new crop of supermodels has taken over, was extremely pleasant and generous during the shoot. And Montreal is a city I hope to visit again sometime soon.

Fashionably Late

It's always good to push yourself. Move creatively into areas you're unfamiliar with. Try things that are a little risky. Things you may fail at. It seems like every time, just before I make a serious breakthrough, I hesitate, just for a moment to consider whether I'm ready to do something. Maybe it's just taking a mental deep breath before taking a leap. Maybe it's fear. But I guess I've been standing on the edge before such a leap enough times in my life to know it's all going to work out. But I have to jump. If I don't jump, well, nothing's going to happen.

If you chart my foray into photography it's quite the meandering path. I guess I was always looking through a viewfinder of one sort or another growing up, but it wasn't until I got to college that I started taking photography a little more seriously. Working for the school newspaper allowed me a bit of film and darkroom access to learn and make lots of mistakes. I certainly did both.

Then came an eight year time out where I started and established my film editing career. I've always felt that my life would be a series of chapters, always concerning something visual or artistic, but definitely not one thing. When I got put on the tedious night shift at the post house I was working out, I felt like I was stagnating creatively and so I picked up my camera again.

It was an interesting time for me because I knew I wanted to make photos, but I wasn't really sure what kind. I photographed Chicago. I photographed friends. I even spent time at Lincoln Park Zoo photographing the animals there. I looked at a lot of photography books. I paid attention to what moved me. My school was the rolls of film I was running through my camera and big coffee table books that allowed me to study lighting.

One of the things I learned early on was that an important part of my photography would always be shooting people. The big question was what kind of people photography would I do? Fashion, portraiture, news, nudes? My incredibly generous and brave friends helped me negotiate my first steps. I would take portraits of them for family and friends. Some would bring their best or most interesting clothes and we would make fashion photos and still others would, amazingly to me at the time, trust me enough to let me photograph them without any clothes at all.

I even got to do a little traveling and live in the fashion world as part of my film editing. I made a documentary in the 90s about the Elite Modeling Agency's Look of the Year. It was really my first opportunity to see the fashion industry up close, especially from the photographer/model relationship point of view. I saw ordinary girls transformed into something completely unreal with hair and makeup and clothes.

I had a few very good friends who were into the fashion world as much as I was back then and they would come over one at a time and we would play dress up and make pictures. I think I was really hard on myself and probably going through some other things at the time that wouldn't fully reveal themselves for a few years. But I never really thought I was very good at fashion. My images never looked like how I imagined I wanted them. Every once in a while I come across a test print or a scan of one of them and I realize that they were actually better than I thought. A little rough around the edges perhaps, but I was shooting without the benefit of proper hair and makeup, not to mention the necessary machine of magazine retouching and other behind the scenes trickery that goes into every single magazine cover.

So I simplified things and began to shoot bodies. No clothes, no hair and makeup, just the very basic beauty that I saw in my subjects. It enabled me to create very personal art because I didn't have to rely on a team to make the images I was trying to make. Light was my hair and makeup. Composition was the clothes.

It was and is the kind of photography I am most passionate about. I'm clearly not alone. Artists have been inspired by the body ever since they decided to draw on a cave wall or paint on a canvas. I'm not ready to give that up yet, but like any passionate artist, I'm trying new things as well. Sometimes new ideas bring a new perspective to older ideas as well.

I'm beginning a fashion project that perhaps has been rolling around in the back of my head for the last ten years. Even though I gave up on shooting fashion, or thought I gave up on shooting fashion, I find that I continued to pay attention to the fashion world. I think I still find that world more interesting than say, the sports world somehow. Good fashion photography still excites me.

So in a rare departure from my usual work, I'm actually letting a model bring clothes to a shoot - and wear them in front of my lens! It's been interesting. Challenging. Rewarding. Strange. Beautiful. All those things when you try something new. We've been having a good mixture of success and misses. So the cake isn't quite done yet and I try not to open the stove door too early, so once again, loyal readers, there are no images from the current adventure to post yet. But there will be... in time.

Perhaps I'll dig up some of the original fashion images from ten years ago and see if I can get permission from my early models to put one or two of them up here to relive my "full of potential" past! We'll see if they want to relive the good old days or not!
Here's one of Jill. She's out in California now I think. Always sends me a birthday card and corrects me when I lose track of how old I am. I was actually younger than I thought one year.

In the meantime I'm going to keep shooting with my new muse and our current fashion adventure. We shot over six hundred images this weekend. We even managed to shoot right through a major sports event that seems to be going on in Chicago this week. I think it's called the World Series. I've caught a few blurbs about it in the local papers. Now I'm going to get back to my copy of Paris Vogue.

Do Over

Okay, let's try this again. I don't normally erase what I put up here, but perhaps some things are best worked out in private instead of in front of the whole world. So yes, there's a missing entry now, but it's probably for the best. Thanks to those who wrote and offered advice and support. I do appreciate it.

I'll repost the photo though. This is from Bologna, Italy. It's the Portico di San Luca and it's three and a half km of stairs. It pretty much captures the overwhelming feeling I was having last night. Sort of insurmountable.

I'm going to try to spend the weekend being constructive. There are a lot of negatives to be scanned and organized and cataloged. Sometimes the feeling of accomplishing a few small projects can turn my bad mood around.

Now to bed.

Muse | myooz | (noun)

Muse | myooz |

(noun) a woman, or a force personified as a woman, who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist.

I am a lucky, lucky man. It's now a month since I've been back in the states after the still inspiring trip to Paris. I feel good. I feel healthy. But most important of all, I feel inspired. It's hard to describe what this feeling is. I find myself smiling quite a bit for no reason. Sometimes I just laugh out loud... again, for no reason. I get up in the morning and I feel good.

But maybe there is a reason. I've been fortunate enough in my life as a photographer to be able to find subjects to photograph. Most of the time not nearly as much as I want, but as the song goes, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well you just might find, you get what you need."

I wrote a while back that for the last couple of years, it seems like my usual cast of models has been either traveling to distant lands or retiring or moving on from the type of modeling they had done with me in the past. I continued to photograph many of them, but less frequently as time went on. As I like to tell them at the end of my shoots, "Thank you, because without you, all I'd have would be a well lit set."

I think if you would have asked me over the years what the single thing I most wanted in my life I would have to tell you it would be a model whose passion for creating beautiful images on a regular basis matched my own desire to do the same. I can always hire models, but what I was looking for was something of a more ongoing relationship. Art history is full of painters, photographers and sculptors who had muses that inspired them from periods of a few years to much longer. Edward Weston and his wife Charis. Helmut Newton and his wife June. Alfred Stieglitz and his wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Picasso and his mistress Genevieve Laporte. The list goes on and on.

Only once in my life did I have a model who I had an intimate relationship with outside of the art we made together. When things went sour, it was difficult for both of us. We stopped working together photographically for a number of years and then mutually decided that even if we weren't meant to be together as a couple, we did make some damn fine art together and we decided to have another go at the art. I think our history together helped us create some of my favorite photographs once we managed to put the past behind us. I think she would agree.

So I guess the last few years when I was hoping to find a connection with a woman who would inspire my art of a regular basis, I knew it wouldn't happen over night. I know plenty of beautiful women, but in order for me to really lose myself and let whatever it is that allows me to make the photographs that I do take over, there has to be a mental connection as well. I've had experiences where I've been shooting an absolutely stunning woman, but there was no connection on a higher, more cerebral level and the photos suffered because of it.

Beauty and inspiration comes in many forms, but for me, beauty has to show up with a brain as well.

...And sometimes a muse arrives when and where you least expect it.

I'm not a superstitious person, but I do know that in the early stages of something wonderful, it's best not to examine it too closely. Inspiration is a bit like quick silver and if you try to grab it or contain it, you can lose it all together. So yes, I'll admit it. My new muse revealed herself to me quite recently. She had been in my photographic thoughts quite often in the last year, but she never really seemed interested in being in front of my lens. She was always very supportive of my work, but that was about as far as it would go. Until last week.

And that's all I'm prepared to say at this time... at least in public. This will be one of the few times I have a blog entry with no photographs. I have to say that I have such profound respect for this new artist/muse relationship that I'm just not going to rush it along here. It's too rare and beautiful a thing to have true inspiration in my life. She is my muse. I am indeed a lucky, lucky man.

Then and Now

It's been almost exactly three weeks since Morgan and I got on a plane in Paris one beautiful rainy Sunday morning and began our journey back home to Chicago. And even though three weeks is not a very long stretch of time, I do feel like I have some perspective on the things we both came to realize while we were there.

Life is very different for both of us now, even though only our close friends would probably notice any outward difference. We still go to the same jobs, live in the same homes we did before we left, but something is different. Morgan and I are really in different places in our respective lives right now, but somehow there is a symmetry to where we find ourselves these last three weeks. Our time in Paris really caused both of us to reevaluate our priorities and where we want to be in the future, both literally and figuratively.

For both of us, it's a time of new beginnings. Maybe changing directions, maybe not, but definitely specific goals and how we're both going to live until we achieve them have made themselves very evident. Dreams that were dormant or undiscovered suddenly revealed themselves during long walks through the cobblestone streets, conversations at various cafés or inspiring dinners, and certainly the kind of discussions you only have at the end of the day back at the Hotel de Suede Saint Germain at 3am over a bottle of French wine with a baguette and some cheese.

Une bouteille de vin français, d'un baguette et de fromage.

We will both return to France, for short periods of time over the next few years, and then eventually to live there. It's as clear for both of us as anything we're feeling right now. People who know us well know we're both the kind of people that do what we set out to do and this will certainly be no different.

I was just on the phone with my good friend Monkaey, who ironically is back in the states for a few weeks doing a little figuring out of her own. We were talking about my plan to have photography show in Paris in the next two years and she said, "I know you'll do it. You have the sort of strong will that makes things like that happen and make the rest of us look bad." I had to laugh because she has spent the last few years of her life living in China and England, traveling through Asia and Russia and seeing more of the world in five years with her own eyes than most people will ever see on the Travel Channel from their overstuffed suburban sofas. So her will is nothing to sneeze at either.

But yes, I have big plans and I've already begun making changes in my life to make sure I achieve them. I'm just about ready to sit down to a Saturday night dinner that until a few months ago probably would have consisted of a pizza for three and is now steamed fresh corn, brocolli and string beans. I have a lot to do and I want to make sure that I'm around for many years to come. When I moved to my new space back in May, I weighed thirty pounds more than I do now. Sure, it's like a shovel full of dirt out of the moon, but it's a start.

And after spending a week slowing down to walk through the beautiful Paris gardens, sitting next to the fountains under blue skies and generally just taking our time to enjoy life, that stress-free feeling may be the best souvenir we brought back with us. And again, three weeks isn't a very long time , but I can tell you this is the longest afterglow I've ever felt after a trip to Europe. I think it's officially gone from afterglow to a permanent state of mind. I got a wake up call a few years ago when I lost a good friend of mine, Erik Powell, and all of us who knew him promised ourselves we would never let anything get in the way of spending time with our friends, even when demands of work and other stress would tempt us to constantly reschedule and put off what too often seemed like expendable face time.

It's not that I've hit the snooze button on that wake up call, but I think I've made an addition to the don't forget to spend time with your friends pledge. I've added myself to the list of friends I'm not going to blow off any more. I've actually been making time to come home and spend some time putting things away that never quite got organized when I moved in a few months ago. I like coming home to order. I can clutter up a place like the best of them, but I think it adds to the stress in my life when I have piles of projects lying around, or shelves not arranged properly. I've been tackling a little area pretty much every day and I've found that sometimes before I leave for work is a good time to restore some order around here.

Less clutter means my photography is more productive. I'm not talking about shooting because I have been doing more shooting in the last few months than I have in a long time. But all that shooting requires scanning, retouching, cataloging and printing. My website needs some serious attention. With the exception of the blog which gets quite a bit of attention, the galleries section hasn't been updated in a long time I'm sorry to say. That's going to change as well.

Then and Now.

For me there are many levels of then. There is the then from about ten years ago, the first time I set foot in Paris, oh so briefly, exploring the deserted streets on an early Sunday morning on my way back from Greece. Things were very different in my life. I had a lot to learn about the world and who I was. I was still making a mess of relationships because I was looking for validation from someone else rather than myself. I took this image while casually walking from my hotel near L’Opéra national de Paris toward the Eiffel Tower. I began to see it peeking over treetops and I stopped along the way to try to compose photos that were different from the ones I had seen all my life.

Fast forward to the present. Morgan and I just had the most amazing dinner at Man Ray. We were the last ones out of there besides the wait staff who kept assuring us that we didn't need to leave. It was such an incredible experience with a 15 piece orchestra and arias being sung all throughout a delicious Asian meal. We were still buzzing from the wine and conversation when Morgan decided we needed to see the Eiffel Tower - now - even though it was approaching 2am. It was only our first full day in Paris, so we sort of knew what direction we needed to head. We started to see the top of it from between buildings as we wandered down side streets. Morgan had given up on her heels and was now barefoot as we rounded a corner - and I stopped cold in my tracks. We had somehow managed to find one of the corners I had taken a picture of the Eiffel Tower from a decade earlier. I couldn't remember exactly where I was standing, but ironically in my hand was the exact same Nikon F3 camera and 24mm lens that I had with me on that brief Sunday morning stroll.

Morgan already had her camera out and I was looking for a place to brace myself for the one second exposure I figured I would need to make to have anything come out on the film. A nearby wall seemed as good a place as any and so I framed and clicked. It wasn't until we got back and I developed the film that I could be sure it was the same street, but it seems to be. I never want to read too much into my images. I just try and let them happen, but I had to laugh when I realized that the main difference between the 1996 image and the one from this year is distance. I have stepped back a little and I can see more in the later image. More perspective. It's how I feel these days.

As far as the revelations that Morgan is experiencing in her life? Well I'm happy to say you'll have to read about them on her new myspace page. She has big plans for the future as well. I know I'm going to make sure to get a good seat for her next few years.