.: Our First Shoot

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Our First Shoot

My first photo shoot with Michiee turned out to be a several hour affair. Shooting at my favorite haunt, the abandoned train station was perfect that day… There was a light overcast that day which can sometimes be good. There is soft balanced light across the entire image. True to my style, I did very little posing of Michiee, who already had in his mind what he was after. There were a couple of interesting moments that got our hearts racing that day. The first was a rather large patch of ivy that covered the ground. We both looked at each other and the pose was obvious. We had just finished shooting some other images where Michiee was wearing a pair of black military boots and a white dress shirt… nothing else! To pose him in the ivy with out disturbing the consistency of the ground cover we placed his feet and then I gently lowered him into position… It was perfect! I made several shots of him in a pose where he looked like he was laying on a mattress made of ivy… IVY! Suddenly I realized that I had no idea about the different kinds of ivy and I rather nervously asked him if he knew… All I got was a large set of eyes looking rather nervously back at me! Well I pulled him back up as quickly as possible and in the long run everything was ok, and I’m glad as it may have been difficult explaining to a doctor just how he got poison ivy on that part of his body!

The next moment was on the third floor... where a broken window let us out on to a section of open roof. Looking over to the left of our location was grand open window casing and ledge. For Michiee to get to it he would have to continue to the forth floorwhich he easily did… there was about a ten foot separation between the roof that I would shoot from and the window. Little did I know but there was an open abyss between the two that was greater than 4 floors... in fact it was more like seven with the design of the building opening up to the part of the building leading to the open tracks! I knew by the look in his face that he was clearly distressed by the distance to the ground… but he took it in stride and we completed those shots with him in nothing more than his boots. Michiee’s lithe and lanky body leant it self to an exotic look, which I think, came off well in these shots. We had several shoots after that, but that first shoot was always my favorite… it was fresh and innovative for me. There develops an unspoken agreement between the photographer and the model and when there is that trust the results will show and I feel these were some of the best images we have ever collaborated on.

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com