Carol's Pregnancy Session

Digital original

Since my first pregnancy images in 1989, I have been fascinated by the beauty of evolving motherhood; I have long hoped for the chance to work with a model throughout a pregnancy. When Carol called me to let me know she was pregnant, and would like to follow the pregnancy with images, I was ecstatic! What was even more fortuitous was that even though she was located in Halifax (just my luck, a chance to work with a model through a pregnancy happens after I move away) her pregnancy (due in the fall) coincided with the summer workshop season, during which time I will be visiting Halifax at least once a month to teach! So plans were laid, and roughly once a month for the next six months or so, I will be working with Carol, doing my best to document the ever changing beauty of a pregnant woman.

8"x10" film

What I hadn't expected was having the entire first session focus on the images we would be making in six months; every composition we made together was produced with a thought to how it would look with the pregnancy was in its final days. Usually, when I work with a model, I am very much in the present, viewing the images through the camera, and envisioning how the final print will look (Ansel Adams had a fancy word for this, "previsualization"), not thinking about how the pose will look on the model months from now.

Monique and Miranda by Candle Light

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After water nudes, candle images are the most requested style of my work by new models and Monique was no exception, specifically mentioning the first time we met to talk about working together that she'd like to work with candlelight. When she and Miranda came to Moncton, candle images were still on her list and, at the end of the models' last day in Moncton, Monique and Miranda spent more then an hour working with a single candle. I had tried candle nudes in the past with two models (both in Maine, and in Halifax) but never had as much success as I did with Miranda and Monique. I suspect a big part of this comes from concentrating on using one camera, as opposed to two, and also form more then five years of intervening experience.

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Usually, when I work with candles, I have the model lie on the floor and then move the candle around until the light looks best. With two models, I usually take the same approach, but in the middle of this session, I caught a glimpse of the candle between the models, and instantly stopped to look again. The candlelight had caught in Miranda's hair, and looked almost magical. I quickly changed the camera angle and pose until I could see through the viewfinder what had caught my eye - a very different and evocative image, compared to my earlier candle nudes.

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From that point, the session flowed between more traditional images, where the models worked around the candles, and more exploratory images, where the models were between me and the candle, and the light wrapped around their figures. The end of the session came as the poses became harder to find. It was only then that a tragedy was discovered - during the download of one of the cards, a mistake had occurred, and more then half the session's images were lost. This was heart-breaking, as I knew some of the images were very strong, but given the number of images I'd lost over the years in the darkroom, it was nothing new (accidents happen), and most of the engaging images (with the candle shining through Miranda's hair) were in the images that were saved, so all was not lost.

Miranda and Monique in Blind Light

When we'd purchased our Moncton home, I realized it would be a very different space to photograph in then the place we'd lived in Halifax. The sky-light in the bathroom is sorely missed and the flexibility of living on the top floor (meaning that models could work right beside windows, even in standing poses) would be lost as well. All that being said, I knew the kitchen in the new house, which faced east, would work well for morning light, and suspected the living room, with three large windows, would work for afternoon light. I worked with the kitchen shortly after all the moving dust settled, but it was only this session, eight months after we moved in, that I had the opportunity to try to work with models in the afternoon light in the living room.

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Because the room is at street level, we had to either work at floor level (which severely limited the possibilities in the way of posing), or use the aluminum blinds in the windows to restrict the outside view in. This had the added bonus of changing the direct sunlight (which I usually find frustrating to work with) into a very interesting striated pattern, which worked well with the models' forms.

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At the start of the session, unsure how things would progress, I hung up a white sheet as a backdrop and, while it did help a little in the way of simplifying the background, it didn't really change the images much; there was just so much contrast between the sunlight and shadow. I quickly let go of any hope of having shadow detail in the images, and dropped working with a backdrop at all. The remainder of the session focused on the light patterns on skin, surrounded by an inky black space, belying the fact that the room around us was relatively small, and definitely cluttered.

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The end of the session saw both Miranda and Monique working with the stairway; at the end of the living room there is an open cut-through to the stair way, with a distinctive triangular shape formed as a result. Since first seeing it, I have planned to make a digital piece to fit the shape, but for this session, we actually took the existing images off the wall, and worked with the slant of the cut-through. The resulting images were very striking, with the light falling onto the wall, and then the model, and then the wall below her .A very dynamic image that wouldn't have had the same feel without the triangular form of the stairs.

Miranda and Monique in Morning Light

8"x10" film

After two studio sessions with Miranda and Monique, I was incredibly pleased to finally have the chance to work with them in an available light session. The difference between working in a studio, where the lighting is determined by myself, the setting has to be created, and the pose evoked through suggestion, and an available light session, where I am responding to the light in front of me, the models are reacting to a more natural space, is incredible. Granted the available light space we were using for this session is as artificial as a studio can be, with the futon being moved from the living room to the kitchen, where the best light is, but my visceral response is the same - a studio session feels artificial and constructed, where a natural light session feels, for lack of a better word, real.

Digital original

Where the studio session saw me focusing almost exclusively on digital images, for this session, I frequently switched between the digital camera and the 8"x10" view camera, taking the extra time to focus on images that seemed particularly striking to me. In an outdoor session, changing from one camera to the other can be reasonably quick, but for indoor images, where the composition is often very tight, and accurate focus and framing is critical, it can often take five minutes or more to set up the camera and finalize a composition. Fortunately, with the models posing on a futon, there was little worry about their comfort (though even on a comfortable bed, holding a pose for close to ten minutes can make anyone stiff) so I felt at liberty to work with the view camera when an image called for it. To some degree, I think the models sense the compliment involved in bringing the view camera into play - it is a direct way of affirming the potential in a particular image, and while it takes somewhat longer to make the final image, using the larger slower camera is a definite comment on the caliber of the image being made.

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After a couple of hours of working, I had exhausted both the models (it is surprising how trying staying still for long periods of time can be), and the photographic possibilities. I was very pleased with the session as a whole - the ease of responding to the models and the light as the session unfolded was welcome after so much studio work in the past weeks and, while the images revolved around the same models, and indeed, many of the same poses, the results were much more satisfying, both in terms of the images, and the experience of bringing them into being.

A Second Stuido Session with Miranda and Monique

After the session in the Halifax studio, Monique was keen to model again (as was Miranda, but given her long involvement with my work, that was no surprise), and after some discussion, the two models decided to take the train up to Moncton to spend a weekend modeling (I could work with them for two of the three days they'd be here). As there is an obvious difference between work with a new model and images that build upon that first session, I was very enthusiastic about their visit, hoping not only to work with them more in the studio but also with an available light session or two.

Digital original

As with almost every other studio session, I began with some simple portraits and then moved on from there. One of the real advantages of working with multiple models is that there is less need for direction or pose suggestions - the interaction between the two models is often enough to present poses naturally - all I have to do then is modify the lighting to suit the pose, and find the composition.

Digital original

While I had the view camera with me for the session, I only made a single 8"x10" negative; I haven't decided if this is because I preferred the spontaneous workflow permitted by the smaller digital SLR, or because only one pose really said "large format" to me. Whatever the reason, I ended up with a very strong set of images, ranging from portraits to more abstract body images. In some ways, it is the abstracts that engage me the most, with the overlapping lines and forms being drawn out of the two models.

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Often, when working with multiple models who are not intimately involved (i.e. who are friends, not lovers), there is a little hesitance on my part to suggest poses that might be construed as too personal, but with Miranda and Monique there was already such a comfort level between the models that this wasn't an issue (this was not at all surprising, given Miranda's previous comfort with working with other models, most recently Kylie). It is not that the images are particularly intimate or erotic, more that the kind of closeness that is required of models to create the images we made during this session is not something that is reasonable to ask of models that are not comfortable with each other.