I was a late bloomer in discovering photography, though when I look back, photography was always a part of my life. I am completely self-taught. I happened to stumble into photography because around 1990, I wanted to produce a photo-based book project about women, done by women. My role would be financier and art director to the project, but the team would be all female. Karen and I interviewed models and photographers for months, frankly without feeling that we had communicated the essence of the imagery certainly to the prospective photographers. Because of this frustration or inability to show a photographer...”this is what I’m looking for,” I approached one of our best friends at the time and asked her if she would agree to be my guinea pig in an attempt to shoot (nude) images with her on a Polaroid camera that I could then ultimately show a to photographer...”this is what I’m looking for.” Jane agreed, and was an excellent first model. I think it’s important for an artist, especially a figurative artist, to find people along the way during the very first stages of their creative development who believe in their vision or have a certain level of trust where that friend is willing to be a collaborator and model for that artist.
I worked with Jane for several months shooting Polaroids on a Spectra camera, and Karen, in all of her wisdom, just said why don’t you shoot the project yourself. That project was never realized, but the exercise actually served me better. It was just the right push of confidence that I needed to begin exploring my own voice as a photographer. At the time I would have never thought in a million years that I would start an artistic exploration in photography, and more particularly the nude as a genre. After all, I’m a fashion designer. 16 years later, I now love the fact that by day I spend my energies creating a language of clothing to dress and adorn the body, but by night, I reduce the layers and affectations down to the nude.
Portrait
of a wrestler
