.: Finding Christmas In Toronto 2013....

Friday, December 06, 2013

Finding Christmas In Toronto 2013....

I won’t be going home for Christmas this year. I really wanted to go but there isn’t the money nore can I afford to leave town while on EI (employment Insurance)… I feel shackled in a way I haven’t felt in years. I had a wonderful visit home in August and this year and so I really wanted to go! As a child Christmas was my favorite time of year besides birthdays, not because of the gifts but because of my mother Carol Ann would often transformed these celebrations into events made of fond memories. At Christmas the home was transformed into a true winter wonderland and for years the secret of Santa was maintained as long as humanly possible. On Christmas Eve we would gather for presents at the grandparents as well as festive meals with the whole family. As I got older the family began to demonstrate that the expectations of Christmas was getting onerous and so things like name picking and or buying for the kids only became the new Christmas as an adult living in another country Christmas became an ambiguous idea for me as meeting the expectations and the cost of travel seemed to take the joy out of the experience.

Yet when I did go home Mothers annual pageant always reminded me of those fond childhood memories. I love Christmas, I Love birthdays, I got that from my mother. I could be her single lasting gift to me. I love my mother. Circle back to a few weeks ago as I am sitting on the couch and lamenting my Charlie Brown Christmas Tree and single strand of lights… Im trying to decide how pathetic my situation is. Ive had such an interesting couple of years which my surgery, and then loosing the best job of my life and it could be easy to think upon this recent series of events and negatively personalize it all, but then my mother comes back into my mind and the sheer effort she would put in to making a perfect Christmas for everyone, even if her efforts sometimes became manic and crazy she simply insisted that Christmas was important for family and the effort kept her focused on what was important. I decided to take another gift passed on to me by her, my creativity and turn it on my situation, How could I find my mother here in Toronto, How could I find my Christmas? What would Mother find magical in Toronto? I began to go out and photograph things she would like. I swam through the commercialization of the holiday and re-appropriated what I saw for myself. The color and festive nature of Christmas is everywhere and it reminds me of my childhood and my mother. So Im here for Christmas, simultaneously broke and blessed and oddly happy. Feel free to stop by if your in town….PS Bring food!;-)

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.

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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