Day after day I saw a new addition being built about two miles away from our house. The houses looked interesting, as much as a suburban tract house can. Finally a sign appeared showing an open house so I went to check it out.
The woman showing the house was tall and willowy with a decided stylish side to her. She showed me around and we got in a conversation about how she ended up selling real estate and her background as a model. We went out onto the little front porch and as we did so the light illuminated her face in a wonderful way. That clinched the deal for me and I asked her if she would be willing to let me take some photos of her. She agreed and that was that.
In the end, after many renditions and much more complicated collage efforts I kept coming back to the beautiful detail of her skin in that light. The color was fantastic but so was the texture all by itself so I landed on the monochrome/color diptych as a way of showing off both those elements.
Another in my postcard series, #7 from our Colorado road trip in the summer of 2007. There was a great trail close to the home where we were staying and I took a hike on my own just for the purposes of photography. When I do something like that I often am not looking for a single shot (though I find those of course) but I am looking for pieces, for moments, etc. that will be part of the raw material for a collage. So in that case I am not worrying always about composition or lighting or a complete image. I am finding the essence of a place or a person and recording it.
In this case the trees had the knots in the shapes of eyes everywhere I turned, flowers were abundant and the creeks had the most amazing light playing on them. The final connection came for me when I saw this woman and her wonderful dog running on the path. The dog was protective and turned to scrutinize me, making sure I wasn’t a threat. The eyes of the dog were compelling and I loved the juxtaposition between the tree eyes and the real eyes.
These were all taken on a brilliant October day in Luray, Virginia. My eldest daughter was getting married and some of our dearest friends took the day off and drove from Annapolis, MD to be there. This is a collage of the mother and the eldest daughter of that family. It includes the fabric from their dresses, a necklace, freckles and collarbones.
Way back when, in the 1980s, there was a very young and stylish guy who came to work at the restaurant where I worked, Eulipia. He was 18. We became friends over many years of working together. He moved down to LA eventually and I met him once down there for dinner with his girlfriend. They eventually married and he became a flight attendant on USAIR.
They settled in Annapolis, MD and many years later what should happen but my daughter attended St. John’s College in Annapolis. We reconnected with him and his family and my daughter ended up very close to them all, babysitting the young ones, staying at their home one summer, etc. We would visit whenever we came to town.
So, now that 18 year old kid who met my daughter when she was born, was at her wedding 18 years later with his wife and daughters who I was able to photograph. It was a great and glorious reminder of the beauty that is within the longevity of relationships.
My photo session with this friend consisted of following her throughout her day, from waking on. I noticed when she was doing her make up that she held her eyelash curler with both hands. I asked about it and she said she had once been getting ready for a date, curling her eyelashes when something startled her and she tore out all her eyelashes on that eye! The date arrived moments later and they spent the evening looking for false eyelashes. They didn’t have a second date. So, from then on has used two hands to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
This image is a collage of 4 distinct photographs. I used an existing lamp in a foyer of a hotel in Luray, Virginia during the reception for my daughter’s wedding in October of 2006. I simply took off the lampshade to get the light I wanted. Two of the images are of the Model, a front face view and a 3/4 face view that I collaged together in Photoshop. At the same time I took those photos I took photos of her butterfly tattoo and her necklace, among other things. I later layered those onto the collage I had already created and slowly but surely melded them on top of the face image. It took a long time! Created using Photoshop CS3.
The Cake Seller – The Stranger Juxtaposition #7
The cake seller at the outlet mall and the cake and the TV image of the flamenco dancer that I shot in the Bose store demo movie in the small dark theatre where they showed off their sound systems which I did not buy but I got a number of shots of the screen that I liked and then realized how the fit and imagined a story of love.
January 31, 2008
In the sunset district of San Francisco, October, 2007.
The gallery employee (I am imaging this but she probably isn’t, more likely a student or maybe a….no, I think I am right, a gallery something or other is likely) in the restaurant that I waited outside of while my wife went to the little girls room with the shoehorn (which wasn’t really in the restaurant, but a few doors down in the shoe store on a bench just sitting there by itself with a great reflection and I said it wrong, she didn’t go in the girl’s room with the shoehorn and the girls room did not have the shoehorn in it, just in case you got confused by my bad writing style) and the Avocados (which were in the market bin next to the tomatoes that were too red to put in the collage even though the photo had them in it and I liked how the red of the tomatoes brought out the red in the shoehorn, still it was too distracting) and the cleavage (which didn’t really belong to her, but to a woman on a bench in the bookstore at the magazine rack who I happened to walk by and noticed her necklace that was just a tad bit too far down her chest but it made me notice her) did it.
This woman was a customer at my hair salon. I had just got my digital camera a few weeks before and was anxious to try some ideas. She was actually getting her nails done, not her hair. I took some photos of her and the nail lady doing her work then asked her if I could take some close ups of her eyes. We walked outside in the shade (but with a very very bright parking lot right behind me as I faced her. She had the most gorgeous green eyes. I took photos looking straight into each eye so I could just see the side of her head at the same time. I combined the one in front of the right eye with the one in front of the left eye to get this look. I then layered the words, copied the collage onto a new layer and turned it grayscale, then cut out all the grayscale image that did not act as a background for the words. I then spent a great deal of time manipulating her face and eyes to get the color and depth I was looking for.
This image of my step daughter Caitlin was a simple color image. I worked it extensively within Photoshop, using the unsharp mask tool quite a bit in getting the high contrast and high grain. The color overlays were relatively random.
The quote is one of my favorites. I read it first in ‘sketchbook with voices’, a photo sketchbook I worked within back in the 80s. I have liked it ever since and think it is a crucial sentiment when understanding what an artist does in the world.
