.: September 2010

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Fall In Montreal

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

The Clouds Of Sunday Morning

No sadness
Can penetrate my spot
Calm temperature
Feeling rise as if they are hot
Safe and strong I’m not alone
Though no faces are those I know
Floating with the clouds
Weightless thoughts
Bring so many boundless dreams
For in life nothing is
Ever as it truly seems
Unless your with the clouds.

Please click to see larger.
Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. Text today is a section from Weightless Thoughts by S.Thompson. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

Water World!

Invested in a waterproof camera... stay tuned for a whole different dimension to my work!
Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

Friday, September 24, 2010

FIRE! @ 200 Wellesley!

Happening right now...as I post this. Six Alarm Fire on floor 24 of 200 Wellesley just one block from me, 27 trucks and well over 100 fire fighters trying to keep this from spreading! Four residents with inhalation as well as some of the fire fighters... No word of anything worse ... As you can see the fire fighters are on the roof of the building..and some residence have been asked to stay in their units even though they are really quite close... You can see them on their balconies in some of the shots! Something like this really makes you think when you live in a high rise!

Images were shot from the roof of my building..29th floor.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Seal 6: Commitment

If you know me well you know I wont be able to sleep until this album comes out on Tuesday September 28th... Seal 6 Commitment.... Here is the link to the streaming versions of all the songs! SEAL6 Very reminiscent of his second album in terms of the lush production values and harmonies.... The Lyrics are already making me crazy in such a good way!

TUNDE!

Tunde Baiyewu is the Nigerian born former lead singer of the Lighthouse Family, a band of soul music , formed in 1994 that made tremendously popular music in Britain, selling millions of albums and writing music for U2. This is one of the tracks from his first solo album... I love the simple romantic soul sound that comes from all of his music. I think for many of us Tunde also represents music we can sing along to with out being out of key!

Monday, September 20, 2010

Creating The Look Of The BlackCat Experience 2010!

I love working for DJ BlackCat, he pushes the envelope creatively and my photoshop skills endlessly. For his birthday bash coming up on October 10th at the Barn he arranged for the single biggest shoot I have ever been on... An endless parade of models and DJ's who will all be spinning that night came in one after another in both all white and all black outfits! Almost 6 hours long the shoot resulted in the various poster and web banners you see here! Needless to say it was a ton of fun. The background is straight out of the movie The Matrix! This also marks the first folding flyer we have ever attempted, helping to create the effect of entering through just a single entry door into the party! Creating these has been an awesome experience which is second only to actually going to the annual BlackCat Experience... Guarantee this party will not disappoint! If your in the Toronto Area make sure you attend!

The World of Markus Bollingmo

The photographers name Name is Markus Bollingmo, and he is a Norwegian currently living in Paris. I came across one of his images on a friends site the other day and I was quickly able to link it back to his website. Along with his work in the fashion world Marcus has done an awesome job of capturing the gay post tweener (late teens early twenties) crowd of europe and other far off places like Japan (some of these images are featured in this post). What I found most interesting when I went through his images was the subtle little things in life that we see and take for granted, reflections in glass, light entering an empty room the structural nuances of a building, bridge or a tree. When you see these images you may find a new apreciation for these moments. This also translates to his images of people. Some time fun, often quite and reflective moments.

You can check out his work on his site: Here

Note: Photos by Markus Bollingmo, text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

Sunday, September 05, 2010

Snow Birds Playing In The Sun And Clouds

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.

Order your copy today by clicking on the books above!

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