polka dot howl

last weekend my friend jason and i did a long photo shoot exploring among other things handstands in the presence of chairs and howling in an unbuttoned polka dot shirt. jason is no stranger to being photographed and is recently famous in some circles as a cover boy for butt magazine. butt is a breath of fresh air in the thin atmosphere of gay magazines (at least my experience of them) and i'm reading nightly a compilation of its first five years which i'm loving. it's brash, broad, unapologetic, printed on pink paper, and carries interviews with gay luminaries as well as garbage boys, all pluses in my mind.

i'm no stranger to being photographed either but i haven't yet achieved the heights jason has, although in new orleans i'm quite sure i am on at least a few refrigerators in various mardi gras getups (who really knows?). but, i've never been photographed at length, with hundreds of shots of slightly different expressions, allowing time for ideas, concepts, thoughts, feelings to develop and be captured. the challenge for me was to drop the idea i needed to look good, sexy, cute, whatever and to just let loose whatever surfaced, much like meditation. watching the faces of isaac and jaden, brenda, eve's and gabriel's new baby boys, i see a stream of emotions rising, falling, rising and falling, seamlessy and without particular order or consistency, and i think, why not be just like that in front of the camera? turn off the filters, take down the guard, unpeel before the lens, just let your own humanity flow. this seems to make interesting pictures. in some ways, it's like therapy, because there is the observed the observer. just the presence of someone else, in this case with a lens, provokes confession when the setting is safe, so it's possible to make deep psychic inroads. i know i hit some powerful stuff because i'm still tingling from the experience.