MORE ABOUT MYLAR NUDES

The reflective material that worked best for me was Mylar. It is plastic but is mirror-like, often used for children’s balloons. I had scraps of it I’d used a few times but I’d also found a roll of it years before on the streets of SF and started using it more in 1993. I saw how well it created reflections but also shapes and textures, almost like brush strokes that evoked wind, water, and strange places never seen. It was almost as if the Mylar was painting for me, but the color was photographic. For example, in color photography it’s relatively easy to get a magenta/green opposition, while you will almost never see this in a painting. When you have something like this embedded in the negative you can’t really get around it. At the same time, with the process I was using, I was intentionally creating this. The photo SteveMagenta is an example. I used a magenta gel on one of the lights, but even given its glaring color I liked it – which taught me something.

SteveMagenta 1993

For this group of photos I had the models lay down on Mylar or I arranged it myself in some other way. I made two series doing this which I like: Mother Earth and Water Mandala. As I didn’t do this long, the photos I shot depended on a handful of people, and a lot of the beauty that I see in these pictures comes from them. Between the new colors and shapes I saw in these photos I felt I was finding my own personal visual language.

Mother Earth #2 1993 – I wanted to make this image swing as if on a pendulum every so often

The funny thing is that with both series, I wanted to move some of the images when they were on the wall. I thought of making motors to do it but never did. One reason behind this urge was I could see abstraction beginning to creep into the shots I took and chose to print, and this caused me to begin questioning the necessity of having one « final » orientation of the picture. Another was some pictures seemed to ask for it. Mother Earth #2 is an example. I flipped the photo from the way I shot it as a sort of metaphor for how we are abusing our mother planet. The thought came to me that I could make the picture swing just a bit like a pendulum every so often.