9/28/10 (NSFW) Folsom Street, SF #1
On Sunday I forced myself to go take pictures during the last couple of hours of the Folsom Street Fair. It was one of those days where I felt obligated to try and shoot even though I wasn’t in the mood. Where I was expecting floats, guys in leather underwear and the typical YMCA sing-along, I found something quite unexpected. Within minutes of walking through the gate I saw a man ball gagged, naked and having his testicles tortured with surgical clamps. I underestimated the event by far and was shocked at what I found. Had I known what the fair was really like, I would have spent the whole day there. Next year I’ll be more prepared. As it is, 3 hours and 5 rolls of film was traumatic enough.
This entry was written by , posted on September 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm, filed under Americans, Street and tagged Fetish, Folsom Street, leather, Porn, San Francisco, Sex. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
9/28/10 (NSFW) Folsom Street, SF #2
This entry was written by , posted on at 4:25 pm, filed under Americans, Street and tagged Fetish, Folsom Street, leather, Porn, San Francisco, Sex. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
6/22/09 Some Busted Leather and Banter about Beauty and other impossibilities
I just returned from a two month trip to Ohio this past week. I had great time out there. I assume I haven’t posted on here for some time because I have enjoyed trying to not think about photography these past few months. I took pictures that I will soon share, but they were selfish ones. In hindsight I think I allowed myself to start the process of reclaiming photography as my own by not taking it so seriously and at times, just rejecting it. Also, I finally wrote a 20 page script with someone and made my first legitimate short film which will be in the post-production phase for a few months. It was a really exciting project. It confirmed the feelings I had of Cinema being my true calling. The whole process of making a short was like being baptized into a new purpose in life (but the water was really hot) and I will post some frames from that soon. On 5/25/09, a day of guilt and confusion, I wrote the note below and decided to not post it for the reasons mentioned above.
This is where I ought to apologize for not posting photographs for several weeks. But I’m not sorry. I was watching the television. A show about South American predators. I saw two bright red cranes flying amidst a flock of black cranes. It was art and I wanted to remake it, share it. It caused me to acknowledge the lack of authenticity in us and how we accept this or recompense. The fact I rarely create work with any notions of novelty is a disconcerting reality for me. It is something I feel I must change. I see this dilemma as a sign that I have incurred a shift in intentions or priorities. As of late I have been more concerned with getting what is in my head, out of my head. It is a shift from being a documentarian to being an Artist. It reminds me of moving from Catholicism to Agnosticism. There remains a residue of guilt in the transition. Not to say you have to be one or the other, but for unknown reasons it often does feel this way; You can’t be agnostic and catholic, you have to be a journalist or an artist. Something inside me says this shift in intentions (the capturing of the beautiful and the abstract instead of reality) will create more relative good than my previous aspirations.
If as an “artist” I accept that I can not create anything truly original, then I feel I must attempt to create something absolutely beautiful or honest. In this moment, creation begins to feel like the pursuit of a strange character, an entity that changes often. It morphs from the desire to help others, to the potential of sharing social ironies and truths, to attempting to illustrate the innermost visions of the mind, to preserving fleeting emotions. These are all equally noble pursuits, but along with the desire as an individual artist to visually articulate beauty or truth comes all too easily, in my case, the desires to be different or to be validated. To not be forgotten. I am realizing these selfish desires are unfortunately too often present in the heart of what I do create. When all you are trying to do is express yourself, it becomes quite easy to only be concerned with yourself. My desire to illustrate the inherently absurd beauty of humanity is too often entwined with a subconscious struggle for permanence and validation. It feels like I’m running down a gravel road with no shoes on. As a sensitive person that places integrity at the top of my priorities, I can not create anything of quality with these selfish desires at bay. They, in a way, hold me captive in a creative purgatory. They are contaminates. Impurities.
But even when I am clear minded and have pure intentions and these struggles are not present, there is always a further vacancy in ability, that being the looming cloud of the near impossibility of fully sharing one’s imagination and vision through a tool designed to capture a split second of reality.
I don’t have any solid answers to these confusions so I’m just going to make assumptions and move forward. I assume I can exist somewhere between being an honest story teller and a slightly introvert artist. I am also confident that I can eventually express my imagination more fully as I move into cinema. And most importantly, I’m quite sure that the more I listen to other people (industry) and the more I concern myself with the status quo of “success” — the less personally successful and creative I will actually be. I am my happiest and the most creative when my mind is focused on nothing more than being kind to those around me, living in the now and the unknown, and pushing my limits. Photography is a personal journey for some people, and it needs to feel that way for me to do my best.
This entry was written by , posted on June 22, 2009 at 1:14 pm, filed under Industry, Personal and tagged B&W, Bar, film set, leather. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.