Fotograf männlich
- Portfolio / Photographer Clint
- 2024-07-05T09:17:27+02:00
- 2024-07-05T09:17:27+02:00
In The Beginning
I have a pair of origin stories. The one for polite society is totally true. Since I was a toddler my eyes were just beyond the limits of correction. As technology improved, they got worse. I rebelled against glasses as a tween but the agony of wearing hard contact lenses made it seem better to stumble around blind most of the time, refusing to subject myself to the ordeal. I had figured it out by high school but the club scene was hard on contact lenses. Long days and longer nights, particularly back when smoking was legal indoors, left my eyes hating me. I went back to glasses. Thick, coke bottle things. It got so bad that I couldn't see well at any point and any slip of the glasses was incapacitating. Frankly, the whole thing made me mad all the time. Mad at myself but willing to take it out on others. A kayaking trip down Baja handed me a detached retina after a day getting pounded by waves and the doc who fixed me up mentioned that I would be a good candidate for reconstructive surgery. That's a thing? You can do that? I held onto that sliver of conversation for a few years before having the money to do it. The doctor who did the surgery told me it was going to change my life and she was right. Shortly after, seeing the world more clearly (also lost some nascent cataracts in the process), I was lighting a gala event at the local art museum and became fascinated by dancers moving through the patterns of light. I reached for my phone to capture it and was disappointed at the pale rendition. It dawned on me that I owned the gear to do this any time, I just needed a camera that could recreate what I wanted to see.
About the same time, an eight year relationship was ending. My tall and dramatic Hungarian girlfriend had found someone who fed her cocaine and sent her home at dawn stumbling and slurring drunk. She would leave my house and turn her phone off. At some point in our endless dead-end conversations she told me that she didn't want to see me around the arts community. SHE was an artist. That was HER territory. I think I laughed out loud. I've hosted an art gallery for years, helped produce events with a variety of arts communities. Whether it's music or painting or circus or aerial....I know everyone and have lent a hand to something. But it stuck with me and as I began to try to express what I had seen using a camera I realized that maybe I was going to be the artist. Hell, in almost a decade I had seen her complete and sell exactly ONE piece. Her idea of art was that artists drank coffee and smoked at the cafe. WAY before I was ready, a friend saw some of my photographs (shown here), experiments in lighting mainly, and invited me to show something at her bar. I printed off a dozen pieces and sold two. So the less-nice side of the origin story was a bit of revenge. Winning. I sold more than you.
But the revenge-y part of it...that fell away quickly. I've never been good at being motivated by anger. I forgive pretty easily, I think. Not for everything but my pique will calm down. And while I began by thinking that this technique was going to be THE THING, I quickly realized how much I enjoyed the input from my models. And then it became a challenge of finding THEIR stories and expressing them. And before you know it, I had lost whatever interesting edge I had and was just another portrait photographer heading out on adventures to do "nude in nature" stuff. LOL.
In actuality, I was very fortunate to meet a group of locally-based art models who were instrumental in teaching me about the ecosystem and their input really gave me direction and guidelines. Don't make Hailey roll her eyes. Find a happy place for Jordan River. How to take Floofie's grace and kindness somewhere....where is OUR intersection for this photo? Through several careers, I have always found circles of interesting friends. Growing up in the punk/post-punk Seattle scene of the 80's, the Grunge Years in Portland, the folk-pop scene that Portland's Eastside was drenched in, Burning Man,...hell, even my recent years seeing my friends grow up and into civic engagement...I've always found INTERESTING people and art models are certainly a fantastic genre for that. I've learned about myself quite a bit, as well. I have favorites, I have types. I had never really been single at any time in my life and I'll admit to using models as a faux dating life. I've only fallen in love with a handful of them (heart breakers, every one!) but it's given me some space to understand a lot of things that I had never taken the time to ponder before. I hope that the love and respect I have for them shows through. They are an amazing bunch, particularly in these weird and repressive times.
As we throw ourselves into summer, I am trying to figure out what I'm going to be when I grow up, if at all. The pandemic stripped me of a lot of ideas I'd had about how life was going to go and I'm unsure about rebuilding the hamster wheel. But what options do we have? Run or die? In the meantime, I have thoughts about building unnatural sets in natural settings and a Rolodex full of artsy collaborators to push these ideas forward. Stay tuned. More to come!
A Triptych, a tasket....
The whole process was new to me. Models, cameras....the idea of ART itself. I've never much thought about art, in fact, outside of knowing it when I saw it. Opinion I can manage. But having reconstructive surgery on both eyes in my late-40's opened up the world. Jordan River (IG @JordanRiverMuse -- do look her up!) was one of the first art models I met in Portland, OR. She was on a big upward launch and had just worked with a couple photographers with whom I was terribly impressed. To say that I was a bit intimidated to work with her is an understatement. Our general predilections seemed a bit removed from each other through the first few shoots and it wasn't until a year or so later that we started to click (entirely on my end, I imagine -- I was technically and compositionally challenged by some fun-yet-stupid ideas I was exploring early on).
As I've begun to dig deeper into editing, I've been having fun going back to old shoots and I will say that it's a huge learning experience. A lot of the time I can now SEE the model attempting to lead me in a particular direction while I blunder off to do something that's not going to work. At my best, I'd hope that I now understand these cues in the moment!
This particular set of images seems to work so well in their context and I just love the drawn out feel of the space on either side of Jordan. If I had the budget to print everything, these would be my next printing project -- I think they'd do well on metal, about 3' wide. LOL. My home is stuffed with art and too much of it is my own. It leads me to wonder if these images have any appeal outside my own enjoyment of the experience? Could they find a home somewhere?
Desert Ed 201
As we bounced out of town with the farms and fields along the Clackamas bathed in sunshine, everything seemed just perfect. I had already done some recon and adjusted my plan to exclude stupid things. The world was my....oh...hello woodland fire vehicles! "Sir, this road is closed," the dour docent of the way informed me. My excitement at the back door to my favorite secret lake being finally OPEN was dashed. But no matter! There are plenty of ways to crack an egg and I was ON IT because I had the perfect shoot planned for a bed of woodland moss and wasn't nobody or nothing that was gonna hold me back!
My moss, so recently released from a snowbank, was underwater. Which was the sort of lucky stroke that my ex-wives hate me for because the quick return to the truck with a thought of lunch revealed a slowly-deflating tire, punctured somewhere along the rough and craggy climb up the back door to the back door. A quick patch and a hasty retreat got us to Madras and a real fix and back on the road in less than the time it took to drink an extra-large mocha.
I had planned to bounce into the desert to escape the mid-June rains always brought on by Rose Festival. I hear it snowed on Mount Hood the day after we crossed its southern flank. There was plenty of frost on the ground outside Post, OR as we toured the geographic center of Our Fair State, chasing wild turkeys (the fowl, not the drink) and wildflower blooms in the chilly sunshine. Epic epic epic. As we sat down to review, we were astonished that our little dashes and patches of art-during-roadtrip had somehow yielded a trove of treasures. Let the summer begin! Let's DO THIS!
Technical note: I'd like to thank Dan Webb for outfitting me with a whole new kit that I relied on heavily for this. And of course the opportunity to dive deeply into an education from the inimitable and gracious Zoë Celesta West, who is a goddamned national treasure of arching eyebrows, pose and wit. We manage to meet up every year or so and I spend the rest of the time poring over the pictures to glean the lessons within. '- )
Where Do These Belong?
Over this past winter, entering my eighth year of shooting figurative art, I began to see a body of work taking shape. Importantly, a body of work that I am proud to share with anyone who will slow down long enough to look! And now the question: what do I do with it?
As the recent Insta meme shouted, nude art is not porn. It certainly can be sexy, even HOT, but while I would be foolish to say that there's not an eroticism to my work, it is definitely not porny. Some of it may not be the first thing I would share with a minor but simple nudity should be more easily understood than many bikini-clad advertising tropes that ARE shoved at children.
One useful exercise recently has been to cull sets of images for publication. But what publications? This site might be an option. Stephen Wong's Images of Nude magazine in Australia is another. There are a multitude of "pay to play" online publications that will suck in whatever content you send and return automated acceptance and upsell emails. Those don't feel all that great.
I have shown pieces in local gallery shows but despite a lot of favorable response, this sort of work is very unlikely to sell (but a lesbian bookstore bought a piece at my first show!). I totally understand. I might hang an interesting portrait of my wife or girlfriend on a wall but a stranger in some intimate expression? Seems like a weird dorm-room feel. A lot of my work has revolved around getting past the usual pose orientation of a model to achieve something more personal. More portrait than pose, unguarded. As I type, one of my favorite shots hangs to my left. Hailey hovers off-balance on a low footstool in a meadow, legs tensed but arms languidly awaiting her body taking flight of some kind. She's caught between moments and could be summoned into the air as easily as falling to earth. For a long time this whole shoot was something that I returned to over and over without being able to share. I finally printed this and began seeing an arc of images that evokes a story or at least stirs the imagination. What do I do with them now?
I have struggled with the idea of admitting professionalism and hanging out a shingle. I can imagine a Neo-boudoir practice where upscale women would find this rewarding. I'm very confident in my ability to walk into any situation or setting and come away with solid images. Hotel room? Got it. Meadow? No problem. Deep forest or a kitchen? Been there. I'm perhaps more worried about the ramifications of doing this commercially. Will it still be fun? Will my clients LIKE it? Honestly, it takes me a bit of time to SEE each shoot. I find it hard to edit at my best immediately. I knew I loved this shoot with Hailey in the moment and there were images that were great right out of the gate but it's been YEARS of revisiting it to really feel like I am getting something deeper out of it. Maybe I'm not ready to do really good commercial work?
Like niche print-on-demand magazines, social media offers little exposure any more. The changes in hashtags that reward large accounts, the ongoing war against art...I have built a tidy little community of models and photographers but social media is hardly the grand reach to a public that would advertise my abilities. I feel surrounded by walls. I can adorn them with art but only I can see or appreciate it.
Kontakt
- #pale
- #redhead
- #oil
- #natural light
- #sleeping
- #nature
- #figurative art
- #model photography
- #naturallight
- #piano
- #feathers
- #hips
- #form
- #pose
- #legs
- #shadows
- #corner
- #modelphotography
- #dramatic
- #portrait
- #lowlight
- #figurativeart
- #experimentalphotography
- #portraitart
- Info Photographer Clint
- 2024-07-05T09:17:27+02:00
- 2024-07-05T09:17:27+02:00
Obsessively breaking the sensor since 2016 with an overwhelming desire to see YOU.