.: 5 Years/7 Months & 200,000 Unique Visitors In the Process Of Sharing A Lifetime!

Sunday, October 03, 2010

5 Years/7 Months & 200,000 Unique Visitors In the Process Of Sharing A Lifetime!

I was first bit my the shutter bug when I was around 8 years old and my uncle Peter allowed me to use his 35mm SLR and darkroom. The snaggly toothed photo of me to the left was shot on just such a photo mission. He shot backwards through one half of a binocular lens and got the effect of a small fish eye lens. Photography was fun! My first real camera was a hand me down from my mother, a Kodak Hawk Eye Browne camera. Constructed of metal and Brown colored Bakelite (an early form of plastic) the camera shot in 120 mm square format. The camera shot fairly good images considering its fixed lens and many of the childhood images that have appeared in this blog were from that very camera. There was an attachable flash unit that used plugin replaceable single use flash bulbs! I have such fond memories of that camera. The photo below is one my friend Ed has collected and seeing it and touching it after 42 years really took me back!

The second camera I owned was a used Canon Pellix 35 mm Camera.... Its was unique as it wast quite an SLR as the mirror was fixed and semi transparent which allowed for super crisp images due to lack of internal vibration. I used the camera all the way through high school including my stint on the school paper and yearbook staff. The camera died an tragic death in the back seat of a car on a hot summer day as the pellical mirror melted in the heat! I was so devastated.

I picked photography back up after college with a borrowed AE1, another venerable Canon Camera..... and when I got enough money I purchased a Nikon F90x which was top of the line for a film camera in those days.... Turning to digital I started with a Canon Elf, Rebel Digital and currently with my Canon 50D! I've rarely gone any time with out my camera and I have captured and kept thousands of images that make up my life and life's experiences. In March of 2005 I was downsized from my job at Ford Motor Company and had allot of time on my hands. I had read many interesting articles about blogs and blogging as a means to create awareness of an individual or a brand and so I set out to share with the world! Tonight I cross over the 200,000 Unique visitor mark! Im pretty excited about how the adventure has been and places it has taken me. Thanks to Google Analytics I have learned that save for a few countries (marked in red) I have been all over the world with my work and words with almost a million and a half visits. I know that Microsoft IE is still the most popular browser with 52% using it and that the world runs largely on DSL at 40% Stats are interesting but for me it has been my fellow bloggers who have provided links on their sites and the thousands of people who have posted or sent comments over the past 5 + years! I just want to say thanks a million!

I also want to say a word about perseverance when it comes to doing the things that you love.... The blog began in March of 2005 but it wasn't until October of 2007 that it finally took off (which you can see on the graph above) Finding like minded people to link my blog helped immensely. Im sure many people don't know that there is a fantasy BLOG Stock Market and in October 2005 my blog was put on the market and quickly rose to a valuation of $35,000 dollars based on links and advertising potential. Over the years Blogs have lost some of their luster and since I have not amortized my blog with advertising other than my own recommendations the value has fallen to $2695.00.... Basically junk bond status though I am much higher than many of the blogs similar to mine. Still its always fun to see my blog traded here(even if its just for fun)

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.

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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.

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