The Dress shop clerk, happy and without guile. We have gone in the store a number of times on our visit to Del Mar, it is a resale shop with great clothes and great deals. We were looking for hats for the first day of the Del Mar Racetrack season, which we were going to attend just for fun! Didn’t find a hat there, but did find some great deals and a great Tommy Bahama shirt.
She had brilliant blue eyes and the bright San Diego sun was out in full force so I asked her to pose for me right outside her shop, which she was happy to do. I am not sure she was hot on my taking photos of her feet, probably worried I had a foot fetish or something (I don’t), but she allowed me to nonetheless.
I brought my 88 year old father into the Vietnamese Nail Salon to get his toenails trimmed. He can’t do them anymore and they get REALLY long before he says anything about them.
While I was waiting I noticed this woman getting her nails done. I was particularly drawn to her wide set eyes and asked her if I could take her photograph. I took some photos of her fingers and nails sitting on the towel waiting to be filed.
Later when I was doing the collage of her face photos I connected the finger photos and kept seeing them as little wings. I envisioned her wanting to fly from the Vietnamese Nail Salon to New York or Dallas, to BE somewhere, to fly to the top, to be seen gliding and flying and rolling across the sky.
I later came across her at the local Target where she is a co-worker of my daughter. She didn’t remember me taking the photos at all.
I did a photo shoot with her back in 2007 and witnessed what a vortex of activity and energy she created while she was modeling. I kept having a feeling of watching a human tornado. I took some photos around the house of objects, windows, etc. and put together this collage that really seemed to play off this idea.
Day four of the week long rejection suite images. The idea behind this series wasn’t just to do something with the rejection letters, it was to do something with the rejected photographs I had taken over the years. This collage is an example of that, using a boring ocean photo, two portraits that were just lighting experiments, and a flared and blurred photo of who the hell knows what. Each by themselves wouldn’t be of much interest but when put together with other images they certainly have much more value and purpose.
We were in San Francisco for a mini vacation and took a tour of the south of Market gallery area. This San Francisco gallery was airy and the assistant had great eyebrows and there was an interesting painting with the word penis in it and there was a colorful potted tree outside and a wall of tile and next thing I know I have a collage.
She wasn’t sure what the photos were going to turn out like, and either was I. I loved the light in the lobby where I worked and this student happened by one morning as the sun reflected off the granite floor.
I liked her red complexion but when I worked half the collage up in black and white and took out 2 of the 3 channels I also loved the porcelain look of her skin. This got me thinking about how others might perceive her in different ways; red, white, porcelain, ruddy, however, her perception of her self, her truth is the same no matter who she is in front of. That is how I came upon the title for this piece.
It is in the ‘Truths and Things I Made Up About This Woman’ series, even with the variant title.
I went into a salon spa near my old house to get info and see the place. I have passed by it for quite a while now. The manager showed me around and I dropped off some Biz cards for her to give to people in need of photographic services. The light coming in through the door was very luminescent (love that word) and the manager had blue jewelry and blue eyes that really popped in that light. I asked her if I could take some photos of her and she said yes right away (always a nice thing).
I was also on the hunt for old buildings and dilapidated structures as part of a group assignment my local photography club was doing that month. After I left the spa I went south into the town of Bixby, Oklahoma and found an entire abandoned ranch off the road aways.
The manager’s color; of her eyes, skin, hair and jewelry were strong and I kept finding similar colors in the new environment. The collage sort of made it self once I saw the colors. I got the feeling of a musical score in colors while playing with the collage and I had seen part of an old opera on a college channel the other night so it was on my mind.
I noticed the woman in the distance drawing me while I waited at the coffee house for my friend who was going to model for me. When she arrived I did some drawings of her, then some photos. All the while the woman in the background was drawing me. This was quite ironic since I had met my model while drawing her at another coffee house just days before.
We were right next to a big picture window and my friend had this luminous glow on her skin from the sky reflecting into the space. Meanwhile back in the establishment the woman doing the drawing was bathed in indoor incandescent light. I loved the contrast and did my best to get both in one image. I could have worked out an image that had both in focus but I liked the blurred image in the back since you could see all you needed to in it without the focus.
We had a fire drill where I worked and as we all gathered in this little outdoor area I was up close to a woman I hadn’t met before. I introduced myself and she told me where she worked in the building. I noticed when she was gesturing that she had this great scar on her arm. I had my camera with me and asked her if I could take some photos of her eyes and her scar for a collage. She was very excited about the idea, much more so than most people and graciously allowed me to do so. I am sure any number of people around me were wondering what the heck we were doing.
She later saw the collage and loved it, purchasing 2 prints to have framed and given to her family. She had grown up hating the scar but in recent years had come to see it as a good part of her body and life. The collage was a sort of confirmation of that she thought.
