MORE ABOUT NUDES

In 1990 I switched to shooting nudes for my next set of tests. The Nude as a category of art carried a lot of baggage for me, but I knew I wanted to see if I could do it differently and that it would be an exciting challenge. The bottom line for me was the person you photograph is literally bare so it is a perfect metaphor to express the personal, the deep and universal. A photograph instead of being an instant of time could be made to speak a symbolic language.

It was a stereotype for me, a male photographer asking a woman to model in the nude – and especially someone he approaches in a bar! I had no funds to hire models but frankly it didn’t seem the way to go if I could. I didn’t want to photograph and work with models in the sense of mannequins I could shape to my will like a doll or robot. I wanted to capture reality, not a constructed one, but a different one, which I called the Blurreal. I decided from the beginning to alternate between shooting men and women, to keep myself honest and focused on the overall project, and also to always include the person’s face in the picture. I wanted to subjectify rather than objectify.

I think these simple decisions helped me a lot. I began asking friends if they would model for me and to my delight many agreed. I looked on each session as a collaboration and told them so. As I look back today I see everything I did then that turned out well depended on friends – those I had and those I made by asking them to model for me.

MikePretzel 1990

I have no process shots of what I did. There were no cell phone cameras in those days. In any event I didn’t want to intrude on the private space we had as we worked, which taking extra shots using a normal sharp camera might have destroyed. But even if that wasn’t the case I had my hands completely full. I was experimenting more or less constantly and trying to evolve the craft of it as I went along. I sweated each session through.

I shot everything in my living room. My apartment like many in SF had sliding doors, so even though the living room is not especially deep, I could open the door to my bedroom and if the camera optics required it, move my camera further back to focus. Sometimes I hung black cloths on my walls and floor, but basically I set up the hot lights and improvised. It was also cozy with a handmade window seat in front of bay windows, wood floors, a couple gold and silver walls and African mud reliefs on other walls. Walter Street was a special place and it was a special place to work, and I think, people who came there sensed that.

View of my living room to my bedroom 2014. The wall with the photos was gold leafed in the 80s

Some good series emerged out of these sessions but the most important to me was 21. Valerie was the counter example, not a close friend but a pretty woman I met and asked to model but what happened I think astonished us both.

Each session I shot 12 or so shots and afterwards, developed and printed them in the darkroom I’d made in the laundry room of my apartment. After the first session we were both surprised by what we saw and mutually agreed to try again. This pattern repeated 6 times until it was done. I printed 21 of them for exhibition at the size I wanted – 16×20 inches. At the exhibition I hung both my artist’s statement and one by Valerie.

Today I look at the pictures I didn’t select and wonder, because so many are interesting to me, what happened?

Because I took so many pictures of Valerie, it made what I was doing more apparent to me. The basic form of her face and body were there, just as in any photograph, but the fact that it wasn’t fixed or recognizably « her » didn’t matter – « she » was still there. I felt I was capturing something else, an inner state or hidden selves – almost a different plane of reality. I called what I was doing Blurrealism because I didn’t feel there was a word to describe it. Each of us perceives our own reality, and these individual realities change over time, overlap and blur into those experienced by others. So much of life is hidden from us, a mystery but we should try to see beyond the surface. I think that looking at life and others sympathetically helps.

Val Hands Sharp 1990