How I Work: A Glimpse

WARNING: There are images in this post of a naked man. His thing is showing. If you're going to freak out about it, go away.

I'm pretty ambivalent about posting this, and I'm not quite sure why I'm doing it -- perhaps it's the compulsive need of the artist to explain himself, although I've never been particularly motivated by that before. Maybe it's just to give you a little tour behind the scenes, because I like that sort of thing. Maybe it's because I've had politics up to here. Maybe I should just let go of it.

I mentioned in a previous post that I tend to work serially, whether it comes out to be an actual series or a group of serial images (i.e., linked by some kind of narrative). What you're seeing here is a selection from a long series of negatives from a shoot from 1999. These are the best of them -- there are many others that will never see the light of day. I don't think consciously while I'm shooting -- it's all gut. I work with a 35mm, usually 36-exposure rolls, and can shoot between four and seven rolls during a shoot. Back in the days when my Polaroid Spectra was still functional, I'd also do 10 or 20 Polaroids; most of the color images in the galleries at a/k/a/ Hunter are from Polaroids. (What a wonderful camera! I could do the most amazing things with it -- the Flashlights, Shatter, Vanished, and Veil were all done with that camera.) Fortunately, 35mm film is cheap. Unfortunately, Polaroid film was not, but the camera died and I've never gotten around to seeing if Polaroid would repair it -- I'm not even sure Polaroid still exists. I suppose I should check.

What you see in this sequence is a little bit of the way my gut works while I'm shooting, and by inference, the relative amount of work that is done in the camera -- almost none -- as opposed to the amount done in the darkroom or on the computer. I once did a shoot for another photographer, working with another model. I think between the two of us he shot about four dozen exposures in four hours. I've been known to shoot around 300 in two hours or so. He spent almost no time in the darkroom. I spend hours. I also make terrible negatives because I tend to push the camera a little past where it wants to go, but fortunately I'm a genius at printing. (I wasn't always. You learn.) That's one reason I'm so crazy about Photoshop -- I can save hours of time and mountains of paper because I can dope out what I want a particular image to look like on the computer and then I have that visual memory when I hit the darkroom. I don't have to make nearly as many decisions there.

All these negatives are actually a way of thinking out loud while I'm shooting. The variations on the image -- the different angles, the varying distances, the cropping and framing, what's going on at the edges, the alterations in exposure -- are ways of talking to myself about what I'm seeing as I'm seeing it. This is mostly laying out the broad outlines -- figure, shadows, the overall composition.

This is a process that continues in the darkroon or on the computer -- refining the image -- but it takes on a different character. It's at that point that I start asking myself what the image needs to say. (That's what I'm not going to talk about here or anywhere else. I'm way too arrogant to talk about what my work means. Besides, I only put part of the meaning in an image. You put the rest of it in. If I have to explain it to you, either I've not done my job or you're not doing yours. My bet is on the latter.) It's also at that point that I start thinking about things like detail in the highlights, how deep I want shadows to be, whether I want a softly modeled, sensuous image or something contrasty and harsh. or maybe, as finally happened with this one, something dark and moody. (Please understand that there are no actual words involved in this process -- this is a total right-brain monologue.)



In spite of the variations in exposure and contrast in this set of images, the negatives are fairly consistent and scan fairly closely to the first image. I've altered the others to give some idea of the range of things I will try in printing to get what I want.

And after I've played around with them enough, what you get is this, which is what appears in the 1998-1999 gallery at a/k/a Hunter (or will, as soon as it's all uploaded).