Six or so years ago, when I first pursued the notion of shooting a homage to “Fred with Tires” by Herb Ritts, I made a version with my beloved M at the local Community Bikes shop. Our little boy was just a few months old and he got to watch the whole session from his portable playpen, just out of frame in this view. This was likely shot with a sputnik.
With this image, we are trying to convey the model’s struggles trying to stay afloat in an ocean of popular media glamour imagery, which features predominantly thin women. Bazaans has a “Rubenesque” figure, so her self-image is constantly challenged as being inadequate. What is she doing there? Is she vomiting some of the published pop glamour imagery? I need your help: let me know if you can figure out what it all means.
This was shot in studio with strobes, I think with my “old” Sputnik.
I’m not sure what to title this shot. I’m not sure what exactly I’m doing with this composition or concept. About five years ago, a vague creative idea started to form in my mind, that intended to be a “challenge” to glamour imagery in general. The idea was to create nominally pinup, or nude, or glamour type imagery, but to embed into the image something that was disturbing. It might be an an odd or disturbing detail that would upend an otherwise tranquil scene, an “easter egg” that would only be discovered if you explored the image relatively carefully and closely. Or it might be an image that more directly challenges the conventions of glamour photography, or that shows in some other way the “truth” behind a model’s reality, which might be quite the opposite of what the picture superficially conveys. This project is naturally self-referential and introspective, as it examines my own critical thoughts on the nature of nude or erotic image making, what it means for the artist, the model(s), or even the audience… and by taking that examination directly to the audience, I hope to challenge the audience to examine itself.
So this picture of Selene is one of several attempts I’ve made over the past few years at creating a “glamour challenged” or “challenged glamour” type of image – I’m still finding my way in this project, and can’t say that I feel any of the resulting images so far are particularly successful. I am still dissatisfied with them.
The day began with Selene and I looking for some pretty, natural spot in which to shoot, and after some hours, we ended up at this river not too far from the roadside. We set up and shot numerous standard or ordinary nude and semi-nude images of her posing among the rocks in this little river. She knew that in the end I’d be asking her to be getting into the water, but by the time that moment came, she was reluctant – she’d already noticed how cold the water was, after having put her foot into it several times. But she was a champ, and finally took the plunge. She gave quite a shout upon first entering the water, but then concentrated on giving me some poses. I had wanted her to look both “attractive” but somehow in trouble, distressed or drowning (?) in this river – and I thought she came up with some passable looks. I think we were both surprised by how she hardly needed to act looking uncomfortable, or indeed of distressed. As we quickly learned the water was indeed brutally cold, and after only thirty seconds to a minute, she needed to come out. I wrapped her in blankets, shivering violently, and it took her probably twenty minutes to recover from this seemingly innocuous dip in the water.
Kat’s Full Service was shot at a perfectly chaotic and disheveled, local “hole in the wall” tire/repair garage in an older part of town. I’d been looking for a place like this for years, to re-interpret a famous picture by Herb Ritts, Fred (google “Fred with tires” there are actually several variants). After finding this shop in 2013 or so, I shot my first “Fred” session with my beloved partner M, and though this produced some wonderful MF3d images, I feel somewhat restrained in publishing them. To have greater freedom in publishing the image, I decided this past year to reshoot it with a “professional” model, and this slide is one of the images that came out of that session. (By the way, Kat really was a professional, and of the nicest sort. She was super helpful and accommodating in the challenging location, totally un-self-conscious and focussed on the modeling tasks at hand, and spontaneously creative in her posing, even after we had attracted a small audience of passers by. And she was fairly easy on the eyes, too;-)
Now, this particular image does not follow on the Herb Ritts image. (I did get one good facsimile of Ritts’s “Fred” with Kat on film, but I am holding onto it, read on). But at least this image is in focus! While this session with Kat produced many fine images on my digital rig, my efforts with film were unfortunately plagued by bad luck and, frankly, operator error due to my long absence from shooting. (The last time I’d shot a model with film was about one year prior, in the summer of 2017 – Selene at a river, an example included in this round of the folio). I shot three rolls of 120 with a “new” Sputnik, yielding 36 stereo pairs, and a pair of 220 rolls with my twin Mamiya 6 rig, yielding 24 stereo pairs. This particular shot came from the Mamiyas.
All of the Sputnik shots were essentially out of focus… either I made a mistake, or the lens markings were off. The garage in the background was in perfect focus, but the model herself was a bit soft on all of the Sputnik shots – a very great disappointment! This was only the second time I had used that Spud, which I had acquired in 2018, after the first couple of test rolls seemed to come out fine. But the session with Kat was more demanding: it was more close up, and due to the light in the shade, I had to open the apertures a little bit, shooting at f16 I think. The imagery, though “out of focus” for MF3d slide viewing, is however good enough for scanning and stereoview printing… but you know that is of little consolation.
All the Mamiya shots were in excellent focus, but a different type of operator error caused more than half the shots to be badly out of alignment – and in such an odd manner that there is no fixing it. I might include a copy of one of those in future, as an exercise or challenge for everyone to figure out what I did wrong. This view of Kat – “Full Service” – however does not suffer from the alignment problem. It is one of less than ten stereo pairs that ended up looking pretty good.
The upshot is that I’ll probably want to return to this garage a third time with a model – beating this creative idea to death as it were. I haven’t decided yet, but I imagine the guys at the shop won’t mind. They’ve been quite amused to have me there with a model.
PS: prior to the session with Kat, I tried to get two warm up filters for the Mamiyas at least, but couldn’t get them in time. Next time around the color will be much better.
Alright.. this one is a little bit nutty. I hesitated putting this in the folio, but I thought: it’s okay if people see where and how I make mistakes…. and yet it might still be entertaining!
The film had gone bad, probably just from old age. Both L and R show poor contrast, weak blacks. The film looks underexposed, though that seems unlikely to happen to me in studio. And the L and R film shows a slightly different color, both tending too much towards magenta. So: let that be a lesson to me: stop using twenty year old film!
But worse than these defects is that I shot too close… way, way too close up, given I was shooting with the twin Mamiya 6 rig, which has a stereobase of over 3 inches. What was I thinking!? I wanted to have an image that did not include the waist, I just wanted head and shoulders and chest. I’ve shot that way before doing cha-cha with a motor-drive Hasselblad (baseline of maybe an inch), but here for some reason I thought it would work out with the twin rig. Silly. Shooting from farther away might have worked better – if I’d had some longer lenses (e.g. 150 mm).
But still I think the the image is interesting. Note that even with the far points set at infinity separation – i.e. the edge of her elbow, not four feet away from me, set to infinity separation – the near points could not be brought to be “behind the stereo window.” So the actual space of her body, which spans a depth of just a foot or 18 inches, in the MF3d view geometry effectively spans five feet to infinity. There’s a lot of stretch!
This is the way I shot for many years in 35 mm film, using a twin rig of film SLRs. All those early images of mine look too stretched to me now – but I guess old habits, or old errors die hard.
I hope you can enjoy it anyway.
Patrick Dougherty came to Charlottesville a couple of years ago, and I undertook to document his work. If you google his name, you’ll soon find lots of background information that I need not repeat here. Patrick was in town for about a month, commissioned by UVA Arts to make a stick sculpture in the (then brand new) Arts commons, right next to Ruffin Hall (which some of you know as one of my “clear buildings”).
Before his arrival, a crew of local volunteers will have assembled. In his first week, Patrick gets to know his volunteers in the work to gather his sticks. Patrick’s raw material is young saplings. He’ll correspond with people in the area, to find “doomed” saplings – i.e. saplings in wooded areas that are about to be clear cut. So he tries not to harvest saplings that would otherwise grow into mature trees.
After a week of gathering saplings with his volunteers, the work on the sculpture begins. The first slide shows some of the initial work: saplings have been stuck straight into the ground, pressed into ground some four or five feet if possible. Each sculptural structure will be anchored by a few very large and strong saplings. These will be placed into boreholes that were drilled first. At this point, volunteers keep busy preparing the saplings for integration into the sculpture – which mainly involves removing all the leaves. Throughout the work, more and more saplings are trucked in from whereever they had been cut.
Once the installation’s initial layout is secured with these larger saplings, then the work can proceed with smaller saplings and “sticks.” My (uneducated) impression is that the sculptures are more or less woven into place. It is weaving with sticks. Dougherty uses no fasteners of any kind. No nails, screws, twine, rope, zip-ties, nothing of the kind! Only the sticks. The work proceeds for about two more weeks, at which point the sculpture will be mostly complete.
His structures thus fashioned can get quite large. Although the one he built at UVA was nowhere more than about ten feet tall, others I’ve seen depicted online can be multiple stories tall. They are also very strong. Dougherty typically specifies that his installations should be taken down after a year to 18 months. But for some reason, this one at UVA was left in place for over three years! (UVA wanted to get its money’s worth, and I bet Dougherty had to remind the university to take it down). Surprisingly, even at three years old, the sculpture didn’t look all that bad – it got a little shop worn around the edges, and some of the structures had started to sag a bit. (I should have photographed it at the end of its life, but I failed to do so).
In the fourth week of his visit, Patrick tidies up loose ends and gets ready for his next project. I include a slide taken at a farewell reception, of Patrick talking with one of the UVA big wigs who funded the project; and a slide showing the finished project with all (or most) of the volunteers standing with Patrick for a portrait (that last slide was helpfully exposed by my beloved Michele). Patrick makes about ten sculptures per year in this fashion: one per month, anywhere in the world. Then he takes off two months to be at home with his family.
PS
I did undertake a 3d timelapse of the birth and subsequent aging of the sculpture: I shot two stereo pairs per day for about four months. After an initial review of the imagery, I decided that it was not looking very “good” (constantly and rapidly shifting light was very distracting in the video), so I didn’t do anything more with it. But you can see some of the beginnings of aging, if you look closely:
Last year we went to an exhibition of installation artists called “Wonder” at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. Several artists made very interesting pieces for this show. Using hundreds of thousands of pieces of reclaimed, old-growth cedar, John Grade built an intricate structure – Middle Fork – based on plaster casts taken of a massive, old-grown hemlock tree in the Cascade Mountains. At Wonder, I shot cha-cha’s with my Sigma DP1-M and a Sputnik. Tripods were not allowed, but I was incredibly lucky: each room in the Renwick had a fairly broad chair rail along the wall, wide enough to give good support to the Spud. The exposures were typically 15 to 30 seconds.
Another model I’ve been working with since 2016, this one is still in town good for more creativity! With her I’ve been trying to explore what I call “Challenged Glamour.” THat’s were I create an image that is nominally an ordinary glamour image, but then I put in some details that disturbs or mocks the normal first impression.
I briefly worked with this lovely model early in 2016. She had some great creative ideas, but sadly we were unable to follow up on all of them, because she ended up leaving town after just a few months. Them’s the breaks working with models – as inconstant as the weather.
The Union Cyclisme Internationale held its World Championships in Richmond recently, to the great delight of bike racing enthusiasts all over the east coast, but especially central Virginia. This view is overlooks the crowds on Libby Hill, the next-to-last climb on the about ten miles around loop of city streets that the riders raced (but they raced something like 15 laps). Ben King, a Charlottesville native, was in the race (he raced in the Tour De France last year as well), and many C-villains were there to cheer him on.
I shot my pictures of the event all at this basic location. From the very bottom of the hill looking up, and also from halfway up, and then this view looking down. You can make out the cobbled road snaking down left and right through the crowd. This was a very difficult surface to ride on – keep in mind the road is ridiculously steep here, and the cobbles reduce traction on your tires. Coming around these bends, most riders tried to stay in the gutter, which was made of poured concrete – much smoother. But the gutter was only ten inches wide or so, right next to the crowd, thus also presented its own difficulties.
I shot a twinned set of GoPros from this location also, trying to capture the action in 3d video. Alas, one of the cameras was malfunctioning (but I didn’t know it – GoPros will sometimes be failing and not let you know…. not good!), so all I got was the “flat” video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55ZElh8q-Ws
You’ll hear a lot of noise in the video which is me fiddling with the Sputnik – I was sharing the same tripod with both cameras. A twin camera bar held the stereoscopic GoPro enclosure on one side and the Spud on the other.
We have a number of trees on our property. Last year we were very busy with our jobs, with Jet, late summer and fall, and so we kept having to postpone raking leaves… or we just didn’t feel like it. 
The more they accumulated, the less we’d feel like it! Sometime in December, we just had to do it. It became a huge chore taking us the better part of two days. I think we hauled two dozen TARPfulls to the curb, I bet close to a ton of leaves, no joke. Only a 3D picture can properly convey the mass, the heaps and mountains of leaves collected.
Shot with Sputnik, f22 probably, 1 sec. on Provia I guess.
“Candid” tripod shot on Christmas eve, when (according to German tradition) the tree is lit for the first time. Boris and Michele on the left, then Jet, and Sarah, his godmother. Probably shot on Kodak E200, 1 second exposure, f8? Focus variable throughout – not the best situation for the Spud’s optics. Lighting is tungsten and a bit of window light. Jet’s godfather, Travis, released the shutter.
Just a few houses down from us is an intersection that I’ve always judged to be hazardous. Melbourne Avenue intersects with Kenwood Lane in a “T” in such a way as to invite sleepy or otherwise impaired motorists onto your property. Melbourne goes over a little rise right before meeting Kenwood on a little steep downhill. The rise prevents a motorist from seeing the stop sign until about the last hundred feet before the intersection. If you don’t know the roads, and you’re going too fast, chances are you’d not be able to stop – especially because coming over the rise your car would be “lifting,” and your traction would be reduced.
To make matters worse, DIRECTLY in the path of Melbourne, i.e. exactly opposite Melbourne, is a house, 1321. When I first saw this arrangement, I immediately thought: I would not want to live in that house; but if I was forced into it, I’d always park some kind of large, heavy, junk car in front of the house. Well, of course the current owners never do that (and amazingly, STILL don’t do it).
So, coming home at night last winter, we noticed a lot of flashing lights just down the road from us. Jet is totally into emergency vehicles, so we went to have a look. I had a peculiar suspicion. Sure enough, an automobile was lodged in the living room of the house opposite Melbourne Ave. Upon coming closer, though, I noticed that it was not 1321 – the house right opposite the intersection – but 1323, the house next to it. The car had come over the rise much too fast and could not stop. The driver had tried to make a left turn, but came nowhere near completing the turn. They jumped the curb, plowed through some bushes, and ended up as you see in the picture, entering the house at a diagonal angle.
To their great fortune, the family was not at home. I ran back to our house and grabbed the Spud and a tripod. With a policeman’s permission I set up at the corner of the property. I shot a roll exposing between 15 and 30 seconds onto RXP (fuji 400ASA). Local TV and newspaper reporters were there too. In the aftermath the story circulated: this driver had been running from the police, all the way from interstate, outside the city. They had come into town at high speed, taking random turns, ending up at this very unsuitable intersection.
The house has just been repaired, some nine months later. I guess it took a while to get the insurance money straightened out. I’ve not yet talked to the homeowners about the event – I might give them a stereoview sometime as a conversation starter. But I have talked to the neighbors at 1321, where I always thought such a mishap would be the most likely: they were surprised by the event, but remain otherwise not much more concerned than before, still not parking their car in front of their house.
For the past year or so there’s been a hotel going up across the street from my studio. Though I swore some years ago that I was “done” with “clear buildings,” the proximity and thus convenience of this building stimulated me to make one last one. It’s the reason I bought a Sigma (DP-1 Merrill) camera: this last Clear Building will be shot with some decent resolution, so that I can make truly large prints.
That work has been digital and is ongoing. But on a recent early morning, I found the building looking quite attractive, complex and mysterious. I shot it with a Sputnik, shooting cha-cha to obtain a larger baseline – maybe 12 inches – to give it more depth and interest. I did not record exposures but I think I shot thirty seconds at f-11 onto Kodak E-200.
I shot the USBG earlier this year during the day, and it is a smorgasbord of post-industrial steam-punk vs. wilderness 3d imagery. I returned last month to try and capture the magical evening light, which makes the place look even more mysterious than it already is. I was hampered by equipment problems (in part of my own making), and did not get very many shots. This is one of the better ones, taken about 5 minutes after the “magic” lighting had ended. (Equipment failure prevented pictures during the magic 15 minutes!).
Then, on the drive home (about two hours highway driving), my car broke down near Culpeper, about halfway home. Michele and Jet had to come fetch me in the middle of the night. The car was repaired in Culpeper over the course of three more weeks. I only got it back just recently. All in all, an ill-fated photo mission.
Sputnik, RSX 400 film, f16 probably, 30 seconds exposure.