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After viewing my photographs,
click on this image and play the game to provide food to end world
hunger. It costs you nothing and the game is fun.
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Future Projects
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| Project
Willendorf Venus |
My life has taken me to many countries and varied locations within the
United States. I have photographed nature, people and landscapes from the cliffs of
Northern California to the beaches of the Caribbean, from the shores of
the Sea of Japan to the plains of the Brazilian interior, from Victoria
to Cancun, from Alaska fishing villages to the dance halls of Buenos
Aires.
It has now become time for new discoveries in photography. While I
will continue photographing life around me whether street vendors or
ordinary tourists, I intend to focus special energy in photographing
women; celebrating women.
For this I am returning to some of the oldest art extant. I go
to Willendorf's Venus dated about 25,000 years ago. This very ancient
figure has been the center of the Goddess Mother speculation of recent
years.
The concept of an Earth Mother or Mother Goddess
or Great Goddess derives primarily from the Greeks. In the Theogony,
written in the early 7th century BCE, the poet Hesiod named the
"deep-breasted" Earth Gaea, "a firm seat of all things
for ever," who, after emerging out of Chaos, brought forth
"starry Ouranus" (the sky), Mountains, the sea, and, after
having lain with Ouranus, a number of non-cosmological Titans.
Willendorf has at times been considered an
early prototype goddess leading to the later worship of Gaea,
the Earth Mother. However this may be, my project will go the
other way. I will celebrate human motherhood as an extension of
divinity. I am hoping to follow a handful of mother's through
the last few months of pregnancy and to document the changes in
their relationships with others, the fathers, friends, relatives
and the child or children. |
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| I enjoy the sight of
beautiful women; beautiful in my vision, not as judged by the mass media. According
to the mass media my pleasure must be sexually
exploitive, one-sided and very age dependent. But I've sometimes pondered that often my pleasure
is not sexual. It is sensual, in some ways not too different than enjoying and encountering a fine piece of
sculpture. It is not age dependent but very individual. But it is not
just physical; it is personal. In my vision the persons are
not simply replaceable objects but people with all their differences,
personal, experiential--human. My vision is not exploitive. If not merely sexual, it is visceral and personal.
In recent years I have discovered the joys of
nudism and frequently spend a weekend at a nude resort. I have learned
how very true it is that nudity is not necessarily sexual, indeed not
particularly erotic. But I've also learned that beauty abounds and comes
in a great variety of shapes and sizes.
To what extent nudity is erotic and or sexual
seems to depend mostly on the state of mind, intention and expectation,
especially of the viewer. I have taken "boudoir" pictures for
some of my friends. In two cases these were a pair of young women.. One
of them, my friend, wanted to send a suggestive picture to a boyfriend
to remind him of his "birthday present" when he returned from
his trip. When we were finished her friend, who was waiting, decided to
ask if I would do the same for her. This photography is intentionally
sexual and I was asked to do it because I was a close and trusted
friend.
The Project Figure Study will photograph a number of
women some of whom are frequently bypassed in our socially accepted standards of
beauty. I will be shooting sessions with women from 25 to 70 all of whom
are beautiful, many of whom would not be thought so by the modern commercial
media. Most of the photographs in each shoot may be partially or fully
nude.
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Project
Figure Study
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