Lost In Fog

This week England is fog-bound. It’s a dark, damp pea-souper over here. The famous English grey mists have descended, and we can barely see a few yards from our front door. It makes driving a nightmare, of course, plus it doesn’t do much for most folks’ moods either.

And yet I love it. It’s like being enveloped in a fuzzy cocoon. The world has contracted, suddenly become smaller. It’s like being lost in time, transported to a mysterious fading black-and-white Brigadoon where sound is muffled, the air smells cold and dank, and emotions are subdued in the grey nothingness. As I look outside, the trees are no longer lush green and brown, but stark black silhouettes against a high-key greyish white backdrop. For this week only, my existence is almost exactly like living inside a black and white fine art landscape photograph. All light and dark shadows at f11 exposure.



So what’s it like living inside a b+w photograph? Well, the first thing that strikes you is the effect it has on your psyche. If your normal average day is a colour photograph, then colour = vibrancy, intense emotion, clarity, LIFE. Its message is easily understood by just about everyone. But how is an emotional message conveyed in a black and white image? When the colour and the life is gone? Because everything is reduced to shades of grey, how do you express feelings, how do you tell the story, show your vision to the viewer?

Well, of course emotions are perfectly possible in b+w photography, but the way they are perceived is very different. If colour equals intense and obvious emotion, then shades of grey are more ambiguous, more subtle, harder to fathom. Mystic almost. You have to think more, look beneath the surface, and whilst you are wandering around looking for that inner message, it is easy to become lost in the misty greyness, or miss the point of the creative vision entirely.

A really good fine art photograph succeeds because the viewer can clearly see what the artist originally intended. He can instantly see the true message in the image. Unfortunately, the nature of photography is that this only happens once in a blue moon. Few photographs are actually that good. Most of the time, b+w fine art photographs are just a mist of mediocrity, nothing special. The vision is unclear because the original artist has become lost in the fog.

O.K. well maybe the metaphor is getting a bit tired, but I’m trying to make a point here.

How does the photographer get out of the fog? How does he cut through the crap so that he can create something outstanding and unique? Well, I don’t think that it is just a case of wandering around lost, and hoping to stumble on daylight by blind luck. I’m of the opinion that extraordinary photographs are created by a combination of constant hard work and following your inner compass.

IMO, to create great photographs, as an artist first you have to know yourself. You have to believe in your own vision, and have the self-confidence to carry on regardless through the mist, trusting that you are going in the right direction to make it out the other side.

The fog is about letting go of control. You can’t see, you can’t know if any particular course of action is right. You just have to feel your way. So even though you may feel lost at the moment, you’ve just got to let go of everything else outside of what you can see in front of you. Trust your intuition. You may be blind, but this heightens your other senses, makes them sharper, more focused. You might not be able to judge clearly today, but pause, take a step back, watch the light and the way it shapes the shadows. See the magic that the mist transforms into something else entirely - a new pattern, a new way of perceiving reality. And then recognise that pattern as art.

And when the fog finally lifts, and the sky is flooded with brilliant sunshine and crystalline vibrant colours, then your creative vision will be clear in front of you. And you can move on.




A very early image of Kate, upside down.

Are they gone yet?

Well, thank God that’s over. Three days of ten-hours-straight cooking for The Grand Feast, up at 5 a.m. yesterday, Rich’s family all day, strung-out overexcited kids, my three year old having a complete meltdown because it all just got too much (I totally identify), plus Rich’s computer blew up Christmas morning (there was smoke, there was profuse cursing, there were no computer games.)

Today I am more exhausted today than I can ever remember. Plus I have put on at least 20 pounds and I am the size of a house. And did I mention that I feel terrible? Somebody please remind me to NEVER EVER do that again.

But it’s over. I need rest. I need low-fat protein and tons of vegetables. I need lots of cuddles. I need a steamy photographic shoot with a highly-trustworthy photographer (when he's finished disembowelling his computer) followed by humongous amounts of photoshopping to remove said-blubber.

But most importantly, I need to start writing again.

Can I go back to gritty, non-festive blogging now, or do I have to wait until the new year?



This is Kate, not me. I never looked this good. No, not even twenty years ago. Kate is a professional dancer. I never was, unless you count over-enthusiasic drunken bopping at a night-club four nights a week for most of my twenties. Accountancy wrecks your liver and your sense of rhythm. Don't let anyone ever convince you otherwise.

Power to the Children

In the1920’s the evolution of printing lithography and the birth of the Leica gave birth to Photojournalism and the concept of the illustrated newspaper. This new technology resulted in the most important persuasive visual medium (before television) and subsequently changed the way humans viewed the world around them. From the 1930’s onwards, magazines such as the British "Picture Post" and the American "Life" publications had enormous status and were able to mould public opinion and the way they shaped society. Behold the power of the visual image!

Nowadays of course, the web is similarly changing human behaviour at a fundamental level. Humans spend large amounts of time online, reading, accessing, researching and assessing information. Then they use what they learn to collaborate with each other, refine the information, and use it to shape their own opinion as to the way the world works. Consequently they are learning vastly different thought processes and ways of viewing information and society than the older pre-internet people grew up with.

Our kids are now “the net generation” and because they are learning in a different way to the methods by which Rich and I learned, they are effectively re-wiring their brains with different software. In the book “Wikinomics”, Don Tapscott calls them the “integrity generation,” because they are learning to demand integrity from the institutions they deal with, whether they be governments, companies, or educational institutions.

Growing up with a constant source of information on the internet means that our children now take transparency for granted. If they hear something on the news on T.V., and they think it sounds suspicious, they check it online. They collaborate, they look for the truth, they gather all information, and they find the real answer for themselves.

Although it is possible to lie online, because of the vast network of millions of people, such falsehoods can be discovered and disproved very quickly. It is much harder for governments to cover up scandal and spread misinformation than it was before the birth of the internet. Nowadays, people do not automatically believe everything they are told by authority. In the words of the X Files, “the truth is out there,” and it is a heck of a lot easier to find than it ever used to be.

If I find out my local council is going to build crappy houses in a beautiful and hitherto protected area of outstanding beauty, I can go online, help form a protest group, organise meetings, raise funds, publicise and gather support, and through this collective gathering of minds, we can put a stop to the development. Which is exactly what has happened several times in our local community inside the last year.

Do you realise what immense power this is?

The power to the people to think differently, to discover the truth about the world, and to change it into something better. This is the power that our kids are learning. They will use this new technology to shape a society which will be a very different place from the one Rich and I grew up in.

And the most wonderful thing about this power is that it seems to be overwhelmingly a force for good.



This is Kate, from last year.

My Muse has lost her Mojo!

Lin has lost her Mojo. I think it fell out of the car somewhere on the M32 near Bristol over the weekend and now she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Maybe it was the food in the Travel Lodge. But anyway, she’s feeling pee'd off with the photographic world. She won't blog, she doesn’t want to look at pictures and she doesn’t want to shoot.

What’s more we have been getting strange phone calls!

A Girl/Woman phoned last week and asked to speak to me, when Lin said I wasn’t here she hung up. Since then there have been several calls and a few seconds after Lin answers, the line goes dead.

This doesn’t help the Mojo problem. If it wasn’t for the fact that I spend every waking moment in front of the computer and every other moment that I go out usually escorted (small children usually), she might think I am having an affair.

Well, I’m not. But, it does lead us to wonder who it could be. They obviously know me. Currently we assume it’s a model who maybe thinks that Lin doesn’t know I shoot nudes. It’s unlikely though, as Lin usually handles the bookings, most of them read the blog, and any models we have booked would have the phone number.

So if you are the person that keeps phoning to talk to me, then please just tell Lin who you are, if I’m not here please leave a message for me to get back to you.

Just a thought though - is my talent so big and throbbing that I have a stalker that wants to throw their luscious body at me? Yea right, that must be it!



This is the lovely KateT

Yanks vs. Brits

Most of my online friends and contacts are in the US. As the our old misguided prime minister Tony Blair once put it, “Britain has a special relationship with America”. All too true. The Brits admire the Yanks for their openness, their freedom, their vision, their audacity, and above all, their ability to “think bigger”. They are annoyed with them because of their brashness, willingness to complain, disregard for manners, over-aggressiveness, the obsession with suing everyone, plus their government’s desire to blow away everyone who disagrees with them. One thing the English just don’t get about Americans is the whole “gun thing”. The right to bear arms. I’ll never understand it. Guns kill people. Get rid of guns and less people will die. It’s not rocket science.

However, the guns issue aside, most Brits greatly admire the Yanks. I’ve never visited America, and courtesy of their stringent fingerprinting requirements for all visitors, I’m probably never likely to. But that doesn’t stop me thinking of the US as a groovy place. I love America! All my favourite t.v. programmes are from the U.S. (even though many of them don’t understand true sarcasm), plus my t.v. heroes are Americans. If David Hewlett (a.k.a. Dr Rodney McKay from Stargate Atlantis) ever asked me to America, I’d be on the next plane over, and to hell with fingerprinting and my marriage vows. Principles can only stretch so far after all! (What can I say, I love geeky scientists with a dry wit and sparkling eyes – definitely “my type”).

The little culture differences between the Americans and British never cease to fascinate me. The Yanks are more open about things, and the British are way too hung up on manners and secrecy. For example, the British find talking about money excruciatingly difficult. You can’t ask an Englishman how much he earns, how much his car costs him or how much he paid for his house. It’s definitely “not the done thing”. We have money phobia, and it makes no sense at all. If you can’t ask people how much they earn, how can you possibly know if you’re being paid your market value?

Americans are more emotionally open than the Brits. You will often find an American nude photographer ranting about his personal artistic opinions to the whole wide bloggie world, but you won’t find that here in the UK. Nude blogs are rare here, plus the English often don’t talk about their emotions, or their feelings about photography. Depression is taboo. We have a very stiff upper lip. Therapy is largely seen as for wimps –if you have an emotional issue, go talk to your best friend. Not terribly psychologically helpful, is it? There’s a reason we Brits aren't emotionally well adjusted. We know this, and yet I’d rather die than get therapy (if I needed it, which I definitely DON’T, O.K?!). Emotions are usually suppressed, which isn’t healthy, but it really isn’t cool here to discuss one’s feelings, and certainly not in public.

And then there’s the accent. In my mind, when I read all the bloggie links on the right every day, ya’ll have a frightfully upper class British Accent, because I do, and that’s how my mind interprets reading your blogs. It actually comes as quite a profound shock if I talk to a U.S. photographer or day-job customer on the phone. He sounds so very….um… “American”. The unexpected twang of the accent. We Brits expect the world to talk like us, behave as we do, and to display English restraint at all times. We are a condescending, unforgiving bunch. Gratuitous displays of emotion from Americans are fairly scary to be honest. If I ever did meet the highly luscious David Hewlett, not only would I be struck dumb by his accent (I know he speaks like that on t.v. but not in real life, surely?), but he is often so emotional that I’d run as mile within moments of talking to him. Reality is much more strange than the virtual world.

I’ve concentrated here on the cultural personality differences, but there are many others, usually silly language differences. Diapers vs nappies, fries vs chips, trunk vs boot, rubber (US condom) vs rubber (UK eraser for pencil drawings), fag (homosexual in American English) vs fag (cigarette in UK), Santa vs Father Christmas etc etc. According to my female American friends, when you make tea you use a saucepan or whistling hob kettle to boil the water…electric kettles are pretty rare in some parts of America, and you stir your coffee with stirring sticks??? How peculiar! We use teaspoons over here. In the U.K., the use of the word “gotten” is grammatically offensive on so many different levels.

I could go on, but I suspect I’m getting boring.

Is there a difference in American and English nude art? Well, the Brits have many less famous nude photographers than in the US (you’ll notice all of our links on the right are to American sites). I think this is partially because the US has millions more citizens (and thus more photographers), plus also the privacy laws are more permissive in the US (over here the nude photography sites are extremely closely monitored, including this blog….hellooo Mr Policeman! Lovely to find you reading this!), and then there’s the fact that we have way more surveillance cameras here, and thus less ability to shoot outdoors without the very high probability of being caught on camera and/or arrested.

You guys have bigger spaces and more freedom. We have no human rights. We are very envious. In a perfect Anglo-American utopia, we’d like to move your best US human rights laws to England. But without the guns, or Guantánamo Bay, or your employment laws, which suck deeply. Thank you, Santa, that would be ideal.

So if I love America so much, why don’t I move there? Well, of course I couldn’t fund the US health insurance, I’d never get a long term job or visa (due to health issues), plus of course, I am fundamentally an upper-middle class British snob. My very English opinions don’t stop me thinking you guys 'n' gals are great, or that I’d greatly like to live in Ohio rather than this charming English swamp, but it does mean that it’s extremely unlikely I’d ever comfortably fit in there, in “real life” (rather than my virtual one).

But then again, I don’t fit in here either, so what have I got to lose?!



For the record, Rich says that if I’m moving to America, then I can definitely go without him. He thinks this post is a “sycophantic pro-American suckup”. Hmm. With tact like that, now you see the reason I generally try to keep him away from the day-job customers…

Bloggie Birthday

It's our birthday! This blog has been going a whole year today!

It’s certainly been a rollercoaster ride. Many times I thought I’d delete the blog (Rich threatened me with divorce if I did!), many times it has been immensely painful and frustrating to write. Other times it’s been immense fun! We have shared our personal journey through the first year of photography with many thousands of complete strangers, and in the process, made many friends and found out many new things about each other along the way. Plus, IMO, Rich has created some groovy art and discovered his true vocation (shooting nekkid chicks!)

We always planned to keep the blog going a year, and then decide whether or not to continue it.

From a personal point of view, even if no-one read my ramblings, I’d still have to blog, no matter what. Ideas for potential posts regularly drag me out of bed at 4 a.m. to kick my scrawny ass onto the laptop. I get no peace until the blog entry is written. Richard, on the other hand, often finds blogging stressful. I always tell him to blog more, simply because I think he’s a great writer. But he always says he’s not a writer, he’s first and foremost a photographer, and he’s happier concentrating on his Art.

So I guess the bulk of the writing will be continued by me (I am after all, the Queen of Waffle, and I do love talking about anything and everything), with sporadic posts now and again by Rich. He says he’s only going to post when he has something he wants to write about – other than that, his work says all he wants to say (Now who does that sound like, Mr Moten?!)

A year ago today, this blog started as a way of exploring what Rich and I were creating together (photographically speaking), and to reassure potential models that we weren’t a couple of pervs. Now blogging has become a way of life for me, almost an addiction. It’s made me realise that writing is my passion. Plus it’s given us both a whole new online bloggie social circle, some brilliant friends and it’s been a great show-case for Rich’s artistic endeavours.

Thank you for staying with us for a whole year.

I can’t promise that this blog will still be going in a year’s time, although that is certainly our intention, but I can promise you that we will be blogging and photographing, somewhere, somehow.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to celebrate a year’s blogging with a bottle of Chardonnay, a shiny black cat-suit, and a pair of giant rubber lips (don’t ask!)

These are the top three most popular images from the last year, in order. The Kate montage, Cheeky Lee’s “Submissiveness”, and the beautiful Roswell Ivory.

What do you consider beautiful and why?

Melvin Moten challenged me on Friday to define my concept of beauty.

Oh dear. Time for another incredibly long blog post, then.

It really isn’t possible for me to define what beauty is for everyone, because beauty is subjective. Everyone will have a different concept of what they find beautiful, so we’ll just go for my view.

Now I read Harpers and Queen as much as the next girl. I do love my fantasies. The images of women inside are beautiful, no doubt about it, but I’m not kidding myself – they are an illusion, a mixture of good photography, MUA’s and Photoshop. Great Art though. And an enjoyable fantasy on a warm summer’s evening when I’m curled up on the sofa drinking a glass of chilled chardonnay. I don’t kid myself that I could ever look like that, and nor would I want to, truth be told. I bet those models don’t look so great when they get up in the morning after four hours sleep either. I don’t look at those images and think, wow they are beautiful, I have to look like that…in fact the images are often pretty samey after a while. So beautiful women in womens' magazines? Nope, not real beauty to me, I’m afraid.

To me, real beauty is the beauty of the soul.

AMOST ALL people, no matter who they are, have something beautiful inside them. To me, the psyche defines the person, and it is irrelevant what they look like.
I just don’t care.

I have found beauty in the most unlikely places, as well as the most conventional ones. I have several friends who have suffered tremendously with cancer, and come out of it with dignity, courage and a burning thirst for life. They may be bald from the chemo, emaciated, exhausted, tired and grumpy, but their spirits are all beautiful because they remain undefeated by their ordeal.

O.K. you say, but what about people who have done evil? There’s no beauty in them.

Many moons ago, I used to do befriending work in my spare time with prisoners – letter writing, visiting them in prison (because no-one else would) and so forth. I met quite a few unfortunates whom society locked up and threw away the key. I wrote to and visited several guys over the years. It was difficult stuff, and sometimes hard for me to cope with emotionally, but I persisted, and one or two even became (almost) friends. On the whole they were nice people, usually “normal” (whatever that is), severely mentally scarred of course, and they had done terrible things, but these guys definitely had inner beauty, the same as you and I.

One guy, who hacked his girlfriend to death with a kitchen-knife, eventually had the immense courage to face his wrong-doing. He knew he had evil inside him, he faced it, and wanted to talk about it, although it took him two years before he could trust me enough to tell me exactly what happened on that awful night when he committed the murder. Now if It had been my daughter who had been murdered, I’m damn sure I wouldn’t have found any inner beauty in him at all, but as it is, prison befrienders have to try to look beyond the evil, to try to help these people, to convince them that there is a way back from the abyss, that their soul does possess the capacity to be beautiful. And if being a prison befriender sounds like a weird thing to do, so be it. But it certainly gives you a unique insight into good and evil.

So do I see myself as beautiful? Well, of course I run myself down in the blog sometimes, much to the annoyance of many of you, but yes, I DO see myself as beautiful, and ugly too.

Have you ever read D.H. Lawrence ?
He had a concept running through many of his books called “ugly beautiful”. Basically you can’t have one without the other. Ugly and beautiful aren’t far apart at all. They are both inside us, and they are inexorably intertwined. When I look at myself, I have both beauty and ugliness inside and out. I am, after all, only human, and I am both good and evil. Not in the same balance as the guy who murdered his girlfriend, of course, but still a mixture of light and dark.

Such is the nature of the soul.

Daniel Defoe once said, “The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the lustre of it will never appear”

I’d like to think that good photographers help take out that diamond, admire its beauty and its flaws, and then give it a quick polish, before putting it back in the box.




The lovely Kate, from last year.

Bullshitting for money

I’m about to test my new-found ability to write, as I have been given the joyous task of re-writing our day-job web site. Rich (a very competent technical writer himself) is completely re-vamping the main web site, and wants a more “human” aspect to it. He wants it to “flow”, whatever that means.

It also has to look whizzy, and be full of catchy marketing-speak. It has to sell our next version of software, and thus put food on our table, pay our mortgage and the kids’ school fees, and of course, pay for all those gorgeous models whom Rich is intending to shoot for the rest of this year (New piccies in two weeks! At last! Hurrah!)

Your web site defines who you are. It IS the company. If folks don’t like the layout, the “look and feel” and the actual narrative (particularly on the front page) then people won’t even bother downloading the software, let alone buying it. I have to wow potential customers, lure them in, make them realise that this widget (sorry, I mean software) is exactly what their organisation needs to make them more efficient, dazzle them, persuade them to part with their hard-earned cash.

No pressure then.

In order to do this, Rich says I have to be “concise”.
Yikes!!!
I don’t do concise.
I do “waffle”. Indeed I am the queen of waffle. I have a background in law and accountancy…verbose is my middle name (well actually it’s Caroline, but that’s close enough). So in effect, I have to turn against and deny my very nature, in order to produce something remotely suitable. So I’m spending the next few days researching other companies’ groovy web sites, and then being inspired by (i.e. imitating) their literary art.

Rich says I have to make the customers feel “warm and fuzzy”.
I have many ideas about this. In particular, I still think we’ll make more money if we stick “free nude wallpaper” on the day-job web site, or provide nude backdrop “skins” to our client software on users’ computers. Tens of thousands of users would see our nude images. Bet that would make them feel warm and fuzzy.

No-one else has thought of this super-groovy idea. We’d knock out our competitors in one sweep. Of course, we might leave ourselves open to litigation from disgruntled bosses who find their employees drooling over nekkid chix instead of working, but it’s a gamble I’m willing to take. Unfortunately, for some reason, Rich does not think this is a good business idea. I think it is a stroke of marketing genius. We are arguing (sorry, I mean “discussing”) this and other rather batty concepts.

And of course I’ll be having a bash at “groovy marketing speak”. I do suck at marketing, so this is going to be something of a challenge. A growth experience. Expect lots of snappy marketing phrases to start appearing on the blog shortly. I will be at one with my inner marketing-guru.

So I’ll be blogging a bit less in the next few weeks, because all my creative juices (and let’s not go there) will be poured into producing the greatest work of art of all…..

Profit.



Kate, who definitely "flows"