12 June 2008

The World I Want to Live In

link to this | View all from »

Fae from Book of Blue. Photo by Eric Francis.

AS I GOT TO KNOW the woman who says yes (see article below), I was gradually getting to know myself. As she was confronted with her own option to be erotically and emotionally independent, I gradually gained the confidence to embrace that person, and to make my own choices with a clear conscience as well.

This shifted my relationship to her and to all women.

I have also learned something about self-confidence from the process of creating the photographs in Book of Blue, and this journey continues to provide my clearest and most accessible learning environment.

When I set out to do this project, I first had to make peace with the fact that I wanted to do so, and claiming desire is a good way to establish confidence. I had to claim the space in myself, then in my relationships. Actually it may have been the other way around; but at a certain point I don’t think there is a difference between “me” and “my relationships.”

My friend Kit Brown, who I met at the artists’ squat at 59 rue de Rivoli when I was living in Paris, first proposed that photographing nudes was something that could be done full time. I don’t do it full time, but it’s my primary interest in photography. Ideas have a way of propagating, and gradually this one took root. It took a couple of years and many photo sessions. It was easy enough to see that in a sexually repressed culture, this was a privilege I needed to claim.

Along the way, I encountered some objections, but I kept going. I heard a couple of “all guy photographers want to do is photograph nude women,” and “don’t you photograph men?” Nobody asked me if I spent time on the other side of the camera. I do, because I love it; but I wouldn’t feel right about photographing anyone nude or otherwise, were I not a photo subject myself; and I would not ask anyone to do anything that I would not do, including being seen by the public.

One of the first choices I made was to specialize in photographing women. I do photograph some men, but early in the work I made a conscious decision and that represented claiming something – which to me represented a definition of art. This was a conscious act of taking a creative right: art is what you want to do, not what you think you’re supposed to do, or avoiding what you think you’re not supposed to do. As for male photo subjects, I decided that I was man enough.

The second choice was to use mirrors in nearly all of my work. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Along the way, the question of sex with photo subjects came up in my relationships and with some of my friends. This is one of the obvious things many people wonder when they see photographs of nudes, especially evocative ones: do the photographers have sex with all these beautiful models?

Well, it would be fun if life were that simple. That is the fantasy, right? But people are people wherever you find them, and I don’t think that a studio setting is any more conducive to an erotic encounter than meeting someone at a concert or at work. In fact, it’s a good deal less so, nudity and a plush environment notwithstanding.

Authentic art cannot come out of a space where anyone feels unsafe or insecure. For that to happen, everyone needs to claim responsibility for how they feel. Earlier in the work I might have said, “I have to hold open a safe space,” but now I would say we both must make an agreement to trust one another.

Then at the same time, I learned to be fully in my feelings without those spilling over and imposing on the person I am co-creating with. This took practice, and it still does. When strong feelings come up, one of the easiest responses to cop is denial.

I did not try to learn it, rather I eventually got the posture into my emotions and body – to be real, in the moment, with myself and not judge who I am.

Not that reason counts for everything, but it’s unreasonable for a woman to think that I’m not going to notice her, or how beautiful she is, especially when she’s a few inches from me; and it’s unreasonable of me to think that it should matter to her how I feel any more than she would otherwise. Yet there are all kinds of often contradictory boundaries around looking, seeing and being seen.

In sum, while our society extols the virtue of a woman making herself beautiful, it is considered impolite to more than glance. With this work, we break that taboo; the idea is to provide a space to look such that looking allows feeling, and where being looked at allows the authentic experience of being seen.

There is at the same time an amorous quality to the work that I do. An exchange of feelings, of erotic energy and often of attraction is natural enough; I am photographing what I see, and what I see I see through my feelings. Indeed, I have learned that I am who and what I see. Rather than projecting that beautiful woman outside myself, I feel her alive within me.

Because there is a mirror present all the time, that is where most of the energy goes – into the experience of self-awareness. The mirror itself is the subject of many of the photos, and it most of the time needs to be the primary subject of the model’s awareness. The mirror provides a structure; a focal point; and the person who appears there becomes a third party in the experience.

In a way, this is a more challenging interaction for many models than merely flirting with me. That’s too easy (I’m a flirt); it’s fun but not that visually interesting. There are all kinds of preapproved cultural scripts to draw on, and easy-to-follow predefined power relationships between men and women. It’s more difficult to make a space wherein someone can relate freely to herself, be a witness to herself, stay in her own feelings and maintain eye contact – all with a witness and, notably, all while being photographed.

More often, the atmosphere feels like zero psychic gravity; everything happens slowly with a high level of awareness. This is an unusually authentic space. Sometimes ideas are exchanged, stories, visions of life, and revelations about the subtle ways we feel about ourselves. Often we work in silence. For this to open up and for the creative alchemy to be activated, the people involved need to be present, and affirm one another as autonomous human beings. This is the only world I want to live in.

Commenting is closed for this article.