I love exhibiting my work. I love having a project or a theme and building a body of work within that theme with the end result of a show! The first time I exhibited my work was in 1993 and I've been passionate to continue with exhibitions since.
I've done 5 exhibitions total. My first was a solo show in Los Angeles with the then unknown 16 year old Monet Mazur. Monet has gone on to become an accomplished actress. But back then, she was a teenage model with Ford and testing and working her way up the ranks. We hit it off and I shot with her many times. But I had this idea with her and she was game and we got together and pulled off the 16 images that ended up in the show in one day! I had this idea of Monet being somewhat "Lolita-esque". She was very sensual, even at her young age and she just oozed personality. Looking back I can see why she has become the success she is. The show had some nudes of her which deemed it "risque". And The Hollywood Elite loved it! I had a signed model release from her mother, who attended the show and bought one of the photographs, so I covered myself on the legal end. The show was a success because it drew a lot of attention. There are two ways you can judge if a show is successful or not: money or press. Or both. This show didn't reap in the dollars but it got a lot of press and I was able to show it in Sydney, Australia where I moved to shortly after this first show in LA.
My second and third show were both in Sydney. I did a series of street people in Sydney, black and white and very photo-documentary style. The third show was an expose of my commercial fashion work. These two shows were highly unsuccessful, earning no money and getting zero press!
In 2005, I had my fourth show. Living back in my home town of Los Angeles, I exhibited a series of young, hot rock and roll boys, the show aptly naming itself "The Boys Collection". The gallery was gorgeous and I had a turn out of over 700 people. I sold 5 pieces on the opening night and was filmed by Fashion TV. Wire image was there photographing the mass celebrity turn out and I was extremely happy with the end results from this show. The recognition led to private showings in elite showrooms and private lounge parties across LA for several months afterwards and the framed pieces continued to sell. My last two shows were in Miami this past February and March. While it earned a significant amount of press, I only had one sale from it. It was a huge disappointment for me because the gallery owner actually took the images, reprinted them large and remounted them in plexiglass. The "Boys" looked amazing!! What continues to baffle me is the amount of abuse I (still) get from this show. Which goes to show you that sexism still exists. While my photographs of a naked young women get hardly a bat of an eye, my "Boys" were deemed border line pornographic (there were no nudes) and I was accused of all sorts of wonderful things! I'll let you use your imagination on this one! It was marketed largely to the gay community which I am in total support of, but even some of my gay viewers had issues with some of it because the boys were youngish looking and not beefcake super heroes. However, they say there's no such thing as bad press and I totally agree! While the Miami New Times devoted an entire full page to bashing me, it still devoted that entire page to me and that led to getting all kinds of great press in other cities' newspapers. The show continues to sell privately and I look back with fondness on the years it took to shoot and the months it took to prepare. I met some incredible young men in NYC and LA while casting for the shoot. The experience was nothing short of absolutely incredible.
I choose to have a side project going on now because my fine art often times "saves" me from the day to day struggles that accompany commercial fashion photography. I don't choose a subject or a theme that I hope will be accepted by the norm out there. I don't care how the work is going to be perceived. In other words, I shoot what I want with my fine art. I mean, isn't that the point? Yes, I grow tired of being told what or how to shoot. When the client is paying me, though, I am happy to do as I'm told. But indeed I have a side that needs to be expressed too and my fine art photography allows me to do this!
1. Find a subject matter that you want to shoot and stick to that theme. Whether it's Wildlife or Art Nudes, pick a theme and stick with it.
2. Figure out how many pieces you want to show in your exhibit and start shooting to build a body of work.
3. Give yourself a "due date". When do you want to be exhibiting by? Give yourself a schedule and try to complete your work within that time frame.
4. Start looking at galleries that you'd like to exhibit in. Or maybe you'd rather do a one night launch party at a local club or coffeehouse. Find your market and your niche and start researching the venues you think would be appropriate to show your work.
5. As you build your body of work, start showing the pieces to your friends. Get feedback. Start editing the body of work down so your best pieces are the only ones left.
6. Figure out how you're going to print and frame your photographs. I researched paper stock for a month before settling on a brand of paper. And then start talking to framers and getting estimates on how much it is going to cost you to frame your photographs. Of course, this task includes figuring out what size you want to enlarge your photographs.
7. Look into getting a small PR firm to help you market your show. It costs a few bucks, but it is so worth it. Your PR firm can get you interviewed by local papers, get email blasts out, get influential people invited to your show. They can even help get sponsors who will put a little money into the event.
8. Keep your expectations of fame and fortune tuned low and try to enjoy the process of building the body of work. When I look back over the exhibits I've done, it wasn't the opening night or the actual show that I remember most. It was the experiences I had shooting for it. The attention and money you can potentially receive from doing a show should be the icing on the cake.
9. I am currently putting together a show of images that depict a passage in my past that wasn't too pleasant. In fact, it was pretty dark. The show is going to be fairly controversial, but you remember what I said about that. A thick skin is very helpful, with both commercial AND fine art photography. Not everyone is going to "get" your work or love your work. Get over it! Do what you love. The rest will come!
In my first year of art school, in 1982, I had to take an Art History class as a requirement. I was pretty unhappy about this, feeling like it was a waste of time as I wasn't going to learn anything about photography. I remember the class to this day. The teacher used a text book and showed us slide shows of the art as we went through the different periods of time and the art of that period. I was bored, restless, and just plain annoyed with being "made" to sit in this class. I arrived late where it was usually dark because lights were turned off to see the slide show. I sat in the back, slouching with generally a bad attitude. Until one day, up came a slide of Donatello's sculpture, David, and I nearly fell off my chair.
A world opened up to me that day. I became familiar with the likes of Da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Van Eyck, Carravaggio, Gentileschi, Rubens, Velazquez, Hals, Rembrandt....the list goes on. You think I understand light? Just look up Carravaggio's The Martyrdom of Matthew. Now this guy understood light! Look at the incredible depth he was able to paint because f he understood light. Or check out Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes. Her knowledge of light creates such an impact to a fairly "dark" painting, dark in both her style and her subject matter. There was a movement at the time she was painting called tenebrism which literally meant, "dark manner". It described the kind of dark that is mysterious and gloomy in feeling. Incidentally, Artemisia Gentileschi was a woman. Social conventions, virtually no education and guild rules tended to exclude women from both training and practicing in the arts!
There were strobes, no beauty dishes, there weren't any websites like this one or the strobist. They had candle light (fire), gas light and the sun. Imagine that! And these painters didn't paint from a photograph taken from a scene because there was no such thing as photography in the 14th century. Yet they understood how light creates not only the mood and depth of a painting, they understood how it created the form of the human body. They studied light to understand it. They also studied anatomy. Understanding muscle and skeletal structure is SO important when lighting the human figure.
Light is as important for the perception of form as is the matter of which form is made. One function of light is value. Value refers to lightness, or to the amount of light that is (or appears to be) reflected from a surface. Value is the basis of the quality called chiaroscuro: chiaro (light) and scuro (dark), which refers to the gradations between light and dark that produce the effect of modeling, or of light reflected from a three dimensional surface.
There was a wonderful post on digitalphotographyschool.com about what the Mona Lisa can teach us about portrait photography. Leonardo Da Vinci used chiaroscuro to subtly play the light and dark, not only in the physical realm but also the lights and darks of human psychology. Modeling with light and shadow and the expression of emotional states were, for Da Vinci, the heart of it all. I won't say too much more because you really should read the post at some point. I was amazed when I found it while stumbling around on dps.
Some good books on chairoscuro and anatomy would help develop your eye as a photographer. I suggest the following:
1. The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern by Carol Stickland
2. Leonardo Da Vinci on the Human Body by O'Malley
3. Caravaggio: A Passionate Life by Desmond Seward
While I believe it's important to keep reading about the technical realm of photography, I can't emphasize enough how it is equally important to read and study subjects outside of that realm such as books on the master painters or the history of fashion. ALL of it adds to your knowledge of fashion photography.
Why did Donatello have such a huge impact on me? After all, it was one of his sculptures that opened my eyes! I can honestly say that I don't know exactly why that particular piece drew me in. Perhaps it was the form and physique, the anatomical perfection of the young boy's body that blew my mind. Or maybe it was the beauty he captured, that was apparent and obvious in the boy's face and stance, that took me by surprise. It doesn't matter really why the piece stopped me in my tracks. What it did was change a bad attitude about art vs. photography into one of unquenchable thirst for knowledge about light, form and emotion. Three extremely important elements in photography. That thirst unquestionably helped open and develop my eye. And truth be told, David, the sculpture of Donatello's, was the catalyst and inspiration for my Boys show that took place 23 years after first laying eyes on it!
