One of the thing  ”how to blog” sites hammer home is the need to blog regularly. Intellectually I understand this completely, and so I set aside Saturday & Sunday as the best time to write something. Usually I get some quiet time while the rest of the family shops. Not so last weekend. I also had the latest shoot, a fairly confronting series of minimalist, nude self-portraits, to try and edit some decent finished works from.

So, this update is a little late. Another factor is that a long, and successful shoot on Monday with Michelle left me very tired. With cancer and recovering from 7 major surgeries in five months, you only have a limited  amount of energy. The revelation last week that I have another aggressive  tumour growing in my left lung, and the possibility that the cancer may have spread to my brain was also draining.

It is my intention to keep pumping out new work as long as I am able to, in the hope that I will produce an income stream that will help loved ones when I am dead. Not all of it, by any stretch, will focus on my illness. I plan to investigate my nude imagery and shoots that can be done in the studio because I can’t get out that often. Ideas, as ever, abound.

One series I look forward to is entitled, “The Ballad of the Stories Between a Mother and a Daughter”. My models, mother Lillian, and daughter, Breana, are long time and very close friends, and both trained & talented dancers, as well as photographers in their own rights, a skill I intend to exploit as I explore the mystery of this marvellous relationship: a relationship that, as a male, I can, and have observed with wonder and even envy, but I can never know. The project is intended to be on a massive scale, numbering well over one hundred images. I’ll be conducting a test shoot, which will be beta tested by a select few, trusted people including brilliant nude artist Jennie Rosenbaum  and, hopefully a staff member or two from significant and important photographic gallery, the Monash Gallery of Art. The final product will be shot in a cyclorama studio on medium format (Phase One P45 or P60).

I’ll also continue my confrontational, minimal series of male nudes that while technically identical to my series of female minimal nudes, seems only more confrontational because of the subject matter being male. It does seem odd that the male nude is somehow less well regarded, and treated with suspicion and even disdain. Despite my being an undeniably straight male there still seems to be a societal expectation that any male nude must be homoerotic, despite straight women vastly outnumbering gay males. For mine, I reject homophobia utterly, and if the images arouse interest in the gay market I think that is almost one form of vindication for my undertaking the work. It is not the purview of any artist to control who makes up his/her audience, and they would be a fool to attempt to. Such a doomed task would be, in and of itself, an albeit futile, attempt at censorship.

So here we have four images from the week’s shoots, two each of a female and a male nude, and two each of  a more classic black & white and two in a minimal style. What do people think? Are the male nudes more “confronting” or is it merely that we are conditioned to look at the bodies of each gender differently? Does this affect your enjoyment of the image? Does it affect your appreciation of the image?

I look forward to the next week’s work, that includes a shoot with fantastic, young, Melbourne prog-metal outfit, Kettlespider.  I’m also hoping to get a studio shoot set up so I can play with the two low-fi cameras that came in today’s mail!