Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Location shoots have their advantages but so do studio shoots. The photographers whose work I admire, from Andy Warhol to Mario Testino, from Fred Goudon to Terry Richardson, Bruce Weber to Wolfgang Tillman, Juergen Teller to Steven Meisel, all do some of their best work in the studio. Four-fifths of the photos on the Major Model site are studio images, over half against a white background. Beauty in images follow trends and the successful photographer not only has to know his craft but also create images that shine above those of his competitors, that grab you by the collar and make you pay attention. In most instances, the media in which it is portrayed determines what constitutes an effective image.

Jay Meisel started out renting a three-room apartment as a studio for $53. A photographer nowadays could spend ten times that just for rent while pay for photographic work has only doubled. And then there are the expensive equipment, computer and software that modern photographers employ in an increasingly competitive field. Jay calls his lighting technique "very unsophisticated." He uses available light which to him means light that he has "experienced" naturally and that he will duplicate if that is what he wants for his photograph. In an interview for a Smithsonian photography series, he says photographers just starting out nowadays have to have mastery of the technology just to get a foot in the door but then there is still the competition with equally skilled other photographers.

With on-location indoor or outdoor shoots atmosphere is easier to create but lighting is easier to control in a studio. My aesthetics are still evolving. Not only am I learning the fundamentals of the craft but I am also still exploring what market I want to break into. Right now I want my images to be high-resolution but just about everything including degree of resolution itself is negotiable and can run the gamut.

I want to do more atmospheric images. White background to me, above and beyond other solid backgrounds, tests the photographer's art the most. It is like playing a Mozart piano sonata without using the pedal as the piano was just emerging in Mozart's time. Without pedal, without the modern-day studio enhancements, the music the pianist plays is transparent, relying solely on his mastery and feeling for the music. Every mistake is glaring but the subtlest nuance is clear too as rain. Here are the top male models according to models.com: http://models.com/model_culture/50topmale models/index/cfm.

I do want to experiment some more with lighting. I've identified a couple of details from my shoot with Brandon that I think I can correct. I still want to do just indoor shoots with white backgrounds but I also want to use parts of my living room and bedroom as setting. Right now I am thinking of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. First performed in 1949 when the Great Depression was transitioning into the high-consumer age of the 1950s, it was a "caustic attack on the American Dream." We're at a similar point today. My hope is that as a society we reconsider the so-called American Dream and what that really means. A house for every family, according to President George W. Bush when he first took office. Maybe the dream is not what it has devolved to today - overly ambitious and greedy corporations, fantastic use of fantasy capital, devaluing old-time saving for a rainy day, excessive wealth display. Maybe we need to cut back on the excesses that have bankrupt our faith and trust in government and our financial system.

I envision a modern-day documentary much like the photographs sharecroppers that Walker Evans collected in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and his other pictures of the Great Depression. I want to create images of the man in the street, the archetypal "young man" facing his future in terms of the current financial debacle, the updated version of Miller's Willy Loman in his many present-day guises.

I still want to try shooting with a green screen so I can replace the background with other scenes, perhaps from my travels or manufactured from sets I'll create later. This amplified equation should give me greater flexibility in composing images. Notice I write of "images" not "photographs." I think the future of the photographic image lies in our ability to manipulate the pixel bits captured by our digital camera sensors with software, in much the same way that movies today, even those not involving fantasy or science fiction rely heavily on CGI and SFX. David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button took over a year and a half for post-production to allow technology to catch up with the vision of the director.

As much as I enjoy software and computer manipulation I acknowledge that photography is at its heart about light. It is the art of capturing light, for crying out loud! But in a highly competitive field a photographer's vision, his idea of what constitutes photographic substance is what will make his work stand out. In staged people photography, the model and his relationship with the photographer are crucial. The successful photograph surely is the product of two minds working hand in hand.

Divining Joy

In Brit director, Stephen Daldry's much praised The Reader, an 18-year-old law student in post-WWII Germany falls in love with a woman twice his age who turns out to be Nazi war criminal. According to star Kate Winslet, it's "a love story"; according to the director it's about the struggle between two generations of Germans, one that participated in horrific genocide and the next generation that had to deal with its vicarious guilt.

For me, the movie is about an intriguing story concept: a young man with an older woman who is illiterate. Literature is part of the chemistry of their intimacy, words treated like love objects. The movie was scripted by British playwright David Hare from a novel by German real-life lawyer, Bernhart Schlink, who in an interview with Charlie Rose sidestepped the question of how much of the story was autobiographical by saying "all novels are autobiographical."

In David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Brad Pitt plays a man who was born old and ages backwards. The movie explores a fantasy many of us have: what if we start out with a young body and a mature mind that has already benefited from years of experience? The story is based on a 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Kate Winslet  also starred in another current release, Revolutionary Road, by another British-born director Sam Mendes. Based on a novel by Richard Yates, the movie is about a Connecticut couple in the 1950s, April and Frank Wheeler (played by Leonardo di Caprio) who sell their house and take their savings to live in Paris for six months to allow Frank to find out what artistic road he really wants to take instead of working a well-paying but boring job.

In my all-time favorite novel, André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name, a seventeen-year-old Italian boy falls in love for the first time with a twenty-something American literature professor and writer who spends the summer with his family on a seaside Italian village. Both are Jewish.

What are the features common to these works of fiction and/or cinema that appeal to me? Are these the directions I need to take to realize my own nascent dreams to become a writer, a tooler in words, ideas and images?

The movies are based on novels or short stories so all these works begin as prose. The concept is something many of us dream about but doesn't usually happen. The works explore what if scenarios with which we can identify. The characters are about people who are in love or falling in love. They are couples usually different or opposite to each other to make describing their relationship bring out features common to most relationships but in a more remarkable, shining, if your will, way. The couple share something deeply similar but have to struggle against their differences to make the connection or achieve a common purpose.

Traveling the Dreamscapes

At the gym last night I noticed that a personal trainer was showing a weight-training program on his laptop to his client in the free weights area. Cool! Why couldn't I produce training videos like that?

On TV last night I watched The Power of Harmony about the Turtle Creek Chorale, a Dallas-based gay men's chorus. It was awesome. Immediately following this was the monthly In Your Life feature that I seldom watch on public TV. It is usually shown late at night when I am no longer watching TV. The show featured two documentaries about gay men and AIDS. I have no stomach for AIDS anymore but documentaries continue to fascinate me.

Later last night, I retired to bed with Christopher Nolan's much-hyped Dark Knight that people are saying could win Heath Ledger a posthumous Oscar for his performance as the Joker. The movie has been touted the "best superhero movie ever." I must say it lives up to the hype. For two and a half hours I was glued to the set. The Redbox movie was in plain DVD format but both the video and audio were phenomenal! The sound in particular was riveting. It thundered through my bedroom speakers without sounding too loud. Amazing. Once again I was reminded how powerful the sound track is when viewing a video. The resolution might be hazy but if the sound is phenomenal the overall effect is lifted by the sound. Last night both video and audio were stunning.

This morning I read from Rob Pope's The English Studies Book about the academic study usually lumped in the university's English Department. The book reminded me of my interest in academic nonfiction books like this. I love learning about culture, art, history, and the individual lives of people especially in media that challenges me to think and rethink my ideas.

This afternoon, I ordered what I called my "last business purchases" of the year from B&H. Aptly enough I ordered their collapsible chroma background set that would not only allow me to shoot video as well as still images and replace the background with a background of my choosing. The included stand would also support reflectors and although it may not be as adjustable as the Denny version it is considerable cheaper. 

After reading Dan Cummins' comments about the photo of his best friend's son I was interested in the equipment he said he used. He shoots with Nikon and for this shoot used a Sigma EF-500 DG Super flash triggered by a Pocket Wizard Plus II. I would love to own  a wireless trigger and camera-triggered lights but the cost is prohibitive at this point. I had bought a cheap flash to use with my Canon D5 but the amount of light cannot be controlled. I was trying to save money and bought a cheap alternative that is not working quite as well. Perhaps I should have sprung for a more expensive Canon speedlite that can be a master but I could always use the one I ordered as a slave if down the road I opted to get off-the-camera flash lighting.

2008 is fast going. I have all kinds of noble resolutions but have not done much real work this year. Maybe 2009 shall be more productive. On the other hand, I am settling down to a new lifestyle. When I got up late this morning I did yoga and meditated for an hour. It felt good to be able to have the time to do this. I can worry about my professional goals but so far I am getting by without much additional income. As my friend, Tony, says, he himself is not "driven" as I am. Perhaps the main challenge for me in 2008 is adjusting my lifestyle to prepare for the rest of my life. Then not having been as productive as I wanted to be becomes less important. In the larger scheme, there are far more important issues.

Calling Me To Danger

It has been snowing the whole morning with two inches of the white stuff dressing the ground. I was up until two this morning reading two of my favorite books, André Aciman's Call by Your Name, and Eddie De Oliveira's Lucky.

Of the two, Aciman's is undoubtedly the better work. He teaches comparative literature at CUNY. Born into a Sephardic Jewish family originally from Istanbul, he grew up in multilingual Alexandria. His prose exudes the best of a cosmopolitan growing up experience. It is refreshing to see someone juggle concepts so elegant and diverse with such grace and elegance. Okay, I've done my quota of adjectives but every one was worth the risk of overdoing a compliment. We should all be so lucky.

Lucky is apparently the first work of a young Londoner born of an Argentinian mother of Italian stock and a Brazilian father whose ancestors came from Scotland. Another cultural mongrel, Oliveira utilizes the patois of young, rocking Londoners to describe the loneliness, confusion and sudden ecstasies of a teenager discovering love and its many chambered heart.

Both books are heavily internal, monologues written out when thoughts are made to stop in their tracks and their ramifications followed down byways and alleys into tiny rooms where no one had lived for years or to the edges of cliffs overlooking rampaging waves dizzyingly far below. If one were not acquainted with thoughts that love incites, these passages would be onerous but for me they are ambrosia from Ganymedes' cup, luscious, airy and sweet, the very stuff of fantasy and what is life without fantasies like this? 

To read these books, especially Aciman's wonderful prose, is to attempt the impossible with sodden words, to run the gauntlet for the flimsiest reward just so one can breathe love again.

Of Acorns and the Oak Tree

The sun stayed out just long enough to get me out of bed this morning. After the mild, sunny autumn days, winter is settling in with strings of dark, cold, rainy or snowy days. And January is not even here yet!

I don't know if the shoot with Brandon will materialize. The prospect certainly inspired me to work with my old model photos anew. This image is one of several I "discovered" with my new Photoshop-processing skills.  I was gratified to see I've shot a few images that I thought were on par with other photographers were posting on the Internet. On the other hand I was disappointed that the bulk of my model photos are simple, head-on head shots. Back then, of course, I was more concerned about taking good-resolution photos and shooting live people whom I could direct to assume poses instead of snapping images before they vanished into the crowd was intoxicating.

There are directions both in photographing models as well as in post-production that I am keen on exploring. So far I've been processing in Photoshop just for composition and lighting, without using the program's bells and whistles to effect more profound or dramatic modifications. For instance, I want to be able to "paint" in specific areas to alter the hue or brightness of these area. I want to be more profligate with color changes, both for the overall effect as well as for specific details. I want to work with monotones containing elements in pastel shades, like ghosts silhouetted on the nets blowing in tropical bed chambers.

Meanwhile, re-reading André Aciman's novel, Call Me by Your Name, has lit a fire under my dream of writing something that combines memories with the lifelong obsessions I've had with religions (especially Christianity and Buddhism), with the experience, theory and ideals of romantic love, and confronting both life and death. Too big for a book? Maybe. Just to get started on a real prose project would be satisfying enough. For a while.

Last night I caught the tail end of a PBS show on "brain fitness" for the elderly. The experts spoke about principles that I've already discovered for myself but hearing them verbalize these ideas was greatly empowering. Attention and focus maintains the brain's ability to crunch sensory data. A rich sensory experience keeps the brain's plasticity. Demanding less and less from our brains leads to early aging. Challenging the brain with new learning and practicing sustained attention on any subject signals the brain that it can't grow old too fast yet. Old people have smaller circles of people they communicate with. This too hastens aging. The principles that work at the gym work for our mental life and life in general. The more we demand from ourselves the more we are given. Don't the religious texts that appear paradoxical and contradictory say just that? 

Maybe maturity brings into union the vast divergences that characterized our youthful explorations of life. Only as we are able to sit down and rest from our labors can we see the beauty and power of true labor, of effort that nourishes, and the wisdom of the ages begins to spill into the crannies of our exquisite, oh-too-short existence.