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| Jill |
Many have written of out of body experiences. They are all
about somehow exiting one’s body and then turning around to look back. Of
course you must first pose the idea that we are a combination of body and
spirit/soul.
I have been able to do this in dreams, but never in real, in
this dimension life.
There is another out of body experience that involves memory. When one is doing something, few if any of us, will think, “How will I look back to this in a future yet to happen?”
Of late I have been looking at a file called Jill. I met her around 1977 and she was my first (and very patient) Muse. I experimented with her my interest in the photography of the human figure. I had lots of this but no experience.
Looking at them now fills me with the same amazement I get
when I read some of my older blogs and I find them alien to me. I ask myself, “Did
I write that?”
I have poured over Jill’s thick files and I find comfort in
seeing in them a simplicity of using only two cameras (a Pentax S-3 and a
Pentax Spotmatic-F), one with Kodak b+w Infra Red Film and the other with an
extremely fine-grained film called Special Order 410 (Kodak SO-410) that was
designed for astronomers to capture solar flares with telescopes. The extended
red range of 410 made the human body look like fine china.
But I must point out that Jill had a voluptuous body, it was
also muscular (great thighs) and best of all she had two dimples on her bum.
She sunned herself in Wreck Beach so she had no bathing suit lines.
At that time I had no studio so my studio of choice in the
case of Jill was her home. How was I to know that soon enough other
photographers would go for the domestic look?
There is one regret in that I cannot show here photographs
that are beautiful in their shape and form but it would seem that in the 21st
century, an age of flagrant accessibility to pornography, the human figure (the
undraped human figure) can only be reproduced as a painting but not as a
photograph.
My photographs after that era of the 70s have evolved. I
have in some cases gotten myself stuck with an obsession at using lighting. I
have played with too many lenses, too many cameras, too many types of film and
now, every once in a while tinkered with my Fuji X-E1. But looking at Jill’s
pictures is like going home. It is going home to a simpler life. When two
cameras dangling from my neck plus (yes!) an exposure meter, were all I needed
for instant excitement and inspiration.