Category: Uncategorized
May 1st, 2002 by sandyadmin
Originally published in the Seattle Gay News, May of 2002
Psst! Between you and me…
Greg Gorman reveals his obsessions
Greg Gorman is one of the giants of contemporary photography. For the past thirty years, his lens has focused on a commercial client list that has included Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson, Leonardo di Caprio and Robert de Niro, while his fine art work, primarily striking shots of his male gaze on male models, has graced the walls of galleries around the world.
His latest show, now hanging at the Benham Gallery on 1st Avenue, features large prints culled from one of his latest books, titled “As I See It,” an exploration of the “in-between time” of masculinity, when the male of the species is neither quite man nor boy, but represents, perhaps, what the Greeks might have once termed arête, a shining moment of perfect maleness.
Released last year by Phaidon Press, the book has now sold out, leaving the interested viewer with little choice but to attend the show. You won’t be disappointed. Gorman’s lens captures the graceful magnificence of the nude male form with over forty gorgeous prints that reveal technical precision along with an advanced aesthetic eye.
Such beauty doesn’t come cheap, however; Gorman’s prints run between $1600-$2000, leaving most of us gasping for air over more than just the subject matter. For the starter collector of Gorman, however, there are also copies of a slip-cased limited edition of “As I See It,” complete with a signed print by the artist for just $300, a collectable that would look quite fetching on your coffee table or divan and would no doubt provide hours of visual entertainment for yourself and your guests.
Also on display is Gorman’s very latest book, “Just Between Us,” a photographic tour de force of the intense creative relationship between the artist and one of his models. As a muse, the model, also named Greg, inspires within his artist a visual journey that is at once fiery, erotic, and sexually charged, but which ultimately appears romantic in its breathtaking obsession with this most beautiful man. The pictures reveal a narrative storyline that appears to depict a relationship in stages, from initial attraction to first encounters, mornings after, and evenings before, the evolution of a relationship that becomes deeper and more intimate as we flip through the book. As time goes on, it seems that both the subject and the photographer have changed, to where both are so relaxed with one another that the truth of both their characters emerges anew. For the subject, we see the hard edges of a tough-guy masculinity stripped away to reveal a softer heartfulness, while the photographer’s gaze changes also, revealing, in familiarity, an increased appreciation for his subject as a man.
“It’s an incredibly gutsy book,” said Paul Dahlquist, a Seattle-based photographer and collector whose own nudes are also on display in this showing. “As a photographer, not only do you show people what you see in your photographs, but you also reveal what it is that you like to look at.”
“Photographers frequently have visual lust affairs with a certain model, but for someone to reveal this obsession in a book reveals a great deal more about his eye than I would feel comfortable revealing about mine,” Dahlquist continued. “That having been said, I think this book is a great visual feast.”
In addition to Gorman and Dahlquist, Seattle photographer Marianne McCoy will also have a series of nudes on display. The show runs through June 15th at the Benham Gallery, on 1st Avenue in downtown Seattle.
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January 29th, 2002 by sandyadmin
Published on the Benham Gallery website, January 29, 2002
Phil Borges:
Ethnographic Exposures
“When I was growing up, my best memories are of the summers that I would spend on a ranch in Utah. The people there had a connection to the land – and to each other – that created a sense of cohesion, stability and connection that I found lacking in the places I came from. The subjects I shoot now share this same quality, connecting to each other and their history and ancestors through the land. I long for this connection in my own life, and I like to see and capture it in other people.”
There is a strikingly beautiful quality to a Phil Borges portrait. Whether his lens is focused on the raw street-tough bonds formed among bicycle messengers in San Francisco, the beauty of the African-American face and body, the look of weary compassion in the eyes of Tibetan refugees, or the impoverished dignity of indigenous peoples in Kenya, Ethiopia, Pakistan, or Mexico, his photographs reveal a delicate symmetry between an individual and the land that they call home.
Borges frames his subjects in the foreground of breathtaking natural backdrops, generally shot in soft focus, and through a printing process called selective toning, bathes his sharply focused subjects in a tone slightly darker than their natural skin color, at once uniting the subject with the environment and emphasizing the human being within the landscape.
In all, Borges has amassed an impressive portfolio of portraits over the course of the past fifteen years, and his work has been compiled into two beautiful books, “Tibetan Portrait: The Power of Compassion,” and “The Enduring Spirit,” a collection of photographs of tribal peoples around the world.
Though hardly a newcomer to fine art photography, Borges’ work as a photographer is in fact a second career. Growing up in the suburban cities of San Lorenzo and Orinda in the Bay Area of northern California, Borges attended UC Berkeley and UCSF, where he matriculated as a doctor of dentistry. For close to twenty years, he pursued a career as an orthodontist, until the birth of his son Dax fifteen years ago prompted him to switch gears towards an old love.
“I had taken pictures as an undergraduate, working as a field researcher in the streets of San Francisco on a needle-exchange project,” recalled Borges. “Walking the streets with a camera, interviewing people and taking their picture, I had a certain kind of access and intimacy to people’s lives that was centered around the camera. When I went to med school, I left the camera behind, but when Dax was born, I took pictures of his birth and I felt a certain tingle that I knew needed to be pursued once again.”
Taking a few photography classes at a community college, Borges immediately embarked on an ambitious project, returning to the streets of San Francisco again to chronicle the lives of the tough, marginalized subculture of San Franciso bicycle messengers. In its own uniquely urban way, this early subject matter contained many of the hallmarks that mark Borges’ entire portfolio, following a tightly-knit subculture that somehow manage to keep it together amidst a harsh backdrop – in this case the jam-packed treachery of San Francisco’s downtown streets.
“I rode with them for eight weeks, following them in traffic on my bicycle,” said Borges. “At the end of the project, I gave a slide show of my work at one of their hangouts and they threw beer cans at the screen, which made it seem like a great success. I knew I had to keep doing photography, and I knew that it was going to evolve into something more than just a hobby.”
By his own admission, Borges possesses a one-track mind, and it wasn’t long before he sold his orthodontry practice to devote himself full-time to photography. Soon after, the Borges family moved to Seattle, and though Borges pursued commercial work, it was his own projects that provided him with the greatest satisfaction, and ultimately, the success he now enjoys. Working first with Seattle street gangs, Borges moved on to shooting stylized portraits of African-American youths, exploring the printing process that has become his image signature.
“With selective toning, the picture becomes as I saw it when I was taking the picture, with the foreground subject framed by the landscape rather than lost in it,” said Borges. “Some people think it’s a gimmick. Some have told me that they think my pictures would stand on their own merits without it. But I like the way it looks, and so I’m sticking with it.”
In 1994, Borges became aware of the issues of the Tibetan people, who were invaded by the Chinese government in 1949 and who’ve endured wholesale slaughter and gross human rights violations ever since. Many have fled the country, including their leader-in-exile, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to form what has become a permanent refugee camp in Dharamsala, India. Altogether, Borges made four trips to Tibet and India over the course of a year, and was able to photograph many Tibetan refugees and gather their stories of the invasion and its aftermath. Along with beautiful portraits of both the Dalai Lama and famed Tibetan exile Palden Gyatso, Borges compiled his Tibetan pictures into his first book, “Tibetan Portrait.”
“At first, it was just intended to be a study and then a showing of work,” he said. “But when the work-in-progress show happened at the Benham, it became clear that a book was the next step.”
Following the book, Borges began to train his lens on indigenous tribal groupings in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Mexico. His work caught the attention of Amnesty International, who asked him to do a book with them to commemorate their fiftieth anniversary. That volume, “The Enduring Spirit,” earned Borges an international reputation as one of our finest contemporary photographers whose unique eye captures the spirit of fragile cultures that may well be on the verge of assimilation into the global culture of western progress.
Now, Borges has again taken on an ambitious task both of study and travel, to uncover and reveal the pan-global phenomena of shamanism. Already, Borges has trained his lens on these mystical teachers and spiritual guides in Mongolia, Pakistan, Equador, Mexico, and the Philippines, to illustrate that outside the Western world-view of progressive, individualistic materialism, there lies an animistic universe where all things are alive and that through a visionary spirituality, some of our relatives can still gain access to this ancient wisdom.
“Shamanism is a fairly ubiquitous phenomena which exists in most land-based cultures throughout the world. In every culture that I’ve visited, there’s an understanding that at a certain age, young men and women can begin to have visions, glimpses of a reality where spirits are real. In our culture, we would probably medicate such claims, but these cultures give validity to those visions, and in fact, encourage the receivers to foster the development of these gifts.”
Methods of induction into these states vary widely from culture to culture, and can range from the ingestion of psychoactive agents like peyote, mushrooms and aya huasca, though many practitioners “arrive” at their states of conscious seeing through dancing, fasting, drumming, and pain-rituals designed to bring about a transcendental state of mind. Recently, Borges traveled to the Lakota Sundance to witness a four-day ritual of dancing, drumming, fasting and ritualized pain. No photographs are permitted at this event, but Borges was simply there to see.
“Our culture focuses its attention on materialism and the cult of the individual,” said Borges. “But there’s something within the tribal grouping that provides an additional sense of consciousness that the individual may not be able to reach on their own.”
To that end, Borges has also recently created his own foundation, called Bridges, that will pair a group of US teenagers with a group of teens in countries with different world-views than our own, using the World Wide Web as the connective link for the exchange of photographs and stories between the two groups. Coincidentally, perhaps, Borges first choice of country for the Bridges project is Pakistan, which bears a rich indigenous and shamanic tradition, which could easily be lost in the shuffle as Pakistan and India are now preparing for war.
“To me, there is a natural evolution between my projects, from the Tibetans to indigenous land-peoples in general, and now with an emphasis on animistic religions that look at the earth and the sky and the stones and the animals and the humans as part of an integrated whole,” said Borges.
In the introduction to Borges second book, “The Enduring Spirit,” writer Isabel Allende points out that while tribalism may look appealing from afar, there are advances within our culture that should not be overlooked. The rights of women, for example, are greatly expanded within a culture like our own, and tribal groups by their very nature often have very strict codes of belief and behavior that may look interesting to the outside observer but which would prove constricting to a modern person. Somewhere between the two worlds of the indigenous peoples who live close to the land and in harmony with it, and the freedoms possible within Western individualism, there may lie a happy medium, and while we have yet to find it, the kinds of people and issues that Borges is exploring and exposing with his shutter, may help to lead us towards this fusion of the best of both worlds.
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April 19th, 1999 by sandyadmin
Word of the Day
Located just off Brady Street and down the block from an ancient SRO hotel, the offices of Parlez Commuications does indeed qualify as one of those famed “South of Market” Internet start-ups – by about fifty yards. The reality of Parlez is not one of those spacious warehouse spaces filled with neon orange speedboats tucked into corners to create a sense of ‘coziness’ or huge 3-D logo models of last month’s branding project hanging from the ceiling. Stashed away in a windowless room with two desks, three iMacs, and a glassed-in refrigerator that also doubles as a bookshelf, where Yoohoos and O’Reilly books jockey for space in the chill. But what the little web company lacks in luxury it more than makes up for in its flagship product – a freebie listserv with one of the largest independent mailing lists on the Internet, known to students, professors, bibliophiles and word-nerds as “Word of the Day.”
Delivering exactly what the name implies each and every day to at least 148,000 unique addresses, “Word-of-the-Day” features a word generally not of common usage, (like “feckless,” “apoplectic,” and “lugubrious”) offers an origin of the word, a definition, and an example of its usage in context. The current listing of previous words runs to the tune of 966 – that’s almost three years, and close to ancient history in the Internet world. The site also includes occasional literary contests like “Guess the Author”, and short feature articles such as the current one on Hippocrates’ “The Four Humors” as well as a listing of the 100 best novels of the century (according to Random House’s Modern Library) with commentary on the list.
List founder and Parlez principal is Michael “Ike” DeLorenzo, a graduate of MIT with degrees in philosophy and biology who’s been working with computers since high school. While working for StarNine, Apple’s on-line division, in the mid-‘90s, DeLorenzo helped to develop two major software products for Macintosh-based services on the Internet – the ubiquitous WebStar and ListStar.
“While I was working for StarNine, I began playing around with lists to see how I could create functionality between lists and the Web,” said the bespeckled DeLorenzo, 30. “So I started my own list in order to get a sense of what might be needed to incorporate web and lists together automatically.”
The result was “Word of the Day.” In the beginning, DeLorenzo kept a pretty low profile for his list, writing one a day and sending it off to a small group of friends, associates, and business contacts. Within a matter of months, however, the list grew exponentially, outstripping the capabilities of the Macintosh LC 475 that he had dedicated as its server. So he brought the list home from work, set up an ISDN line, and bought WOTD a better machine. He now has three other editors scattered around the world who assist with the project – Chris in Japan, George in Washington, D.C., and Katie, who can be found in the less exotic but still quite far-flung land of Palo Alto.
“Word of the Day made me realize that the Internet is a force of its own,” said Lorenzo. “Whereas in traditional media you create huge campaigns to make the market respond to you and your products, on the Internet, a really small niche market can be created virtually overnight if you are offering something that people actually want.”
Over the years, “Word of the Day” has been the target of both love letters, thank you notes, and hate mail. While checking through his list logs recently, DeLorenzo discovered that the Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Katami, members of the United Arab Emirates UN delegation, and New York Times Magazine’s consummate word-nerd William Safire can be counted among the membership.
“It’s really amazing the kinds of people who are subscribed and who send us mail. We get hate mail from the left and right, saying we’re pro-fascist on the one hand and pro-gay on the other. People read a whole lot into our content. At one point, we said something bad about Orrin Hatch, and he personally responded. When Theodore H. White died, we ran a quote by him, and we got this outpouring of mail from all over the world from people who knew him personally, thanking us for the tribute. So it really runs the gamut.”
“Word of the Day” is advertising-supported, with ads on the website and occasional ads in the body of the mail. When it comes to demographics, DeLorenzo figures that for the most part, his readership is primarily comprised of over-educated word snobs like himself. But a growing number of WOTD’s letters are coming from people who want to learn English, and hope that subscribing to WOTD can help them.
“People around the world are currently experiencing the Internet as an English-only environment, although that’s changing pretty quickly,” said DeLorenzo. “And in a lot of these countries, logging into high-bandwidth sites is just too expensive, so they rely on e-mail for the bulk of their Internet experience.”
Parlez was recently approached by a Hungarian investor who wants to take the WOTD concept global with a new service called “WordBurger,” which will deliver business-related words and concepts in eight different languages througout China, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Though the content will be created in Budapest and then diseminated to language editors, Parlez will be running list administration and creating the websites for the service.
“It’s very exciting to use the Internet in this manner,” said DeLorenzo. “WOTD began as a little experiment, really. But people are frenetic about getting it. What’s really fun is to send out the Word and then watch responses come in as people are arriving at work on the east coast, the west coast, Japan, Europe – watching the mail is like watching the sunrise all over the world. And that’s cool.”
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January 19th, 1999 by sandyadmin
In the late 90s, I was commissioned by The New Mexican daily to do a series of artist profiles called Topographicals with Julie Graber as the photographer. There were at least a dozen completed. Here is one featuring multimedia artist Bret Berman.
Bret Berman is the epitome of a Santa Fe underground artist – and not just because his office is below the surface of the earth beneath the Jean Cocteau Theatre. A drifter of sorts from the Catskills in upstate New York, Berman took up residence in Santa Fe five years ago. Berman writes short stories and novels, draws comic books, and makes weird music with his main band Phydeaux III, (pronounced “Fy-dough 3”) and a personal electronic collage music self-ensemble he calls Shocking Baby Secrets. Long a fixture of the slacker central coffee shop known as “the Aztec,” Berman recently was granted the job of entertainment director of the cafe when it recently found itself under new mangement. It was under his direction that the Aztec Sunday night open mic was born, attracting an eclectic blend of poets, acoustic musicians, and at least two preachers who have been known to lead the caffeinated masses in prayer.
But while Berman has been busy providing a forum for the lauching of new local entertainment personalities, he’s also hard at work as a member of the “newvillage.com” digital art team, a consortium of oddball artists who are trying to find effective ways to build community in and around cyberspace. Plans on the boards include a website with the scanned works of local artist, broadcasting of live shows from the Aztec via RealAudio, and the creation of original digital art by local talents. Drawing on his comic book talents, Berman’s digital specialty is fast becoming avi animations, which range from fully original works to appropriated images that he morphs into unrecognizable commentaries on the media zeitgeist.
Soft-spoken to the point of seeming almost blase at times, Berman is one of a number artists around the city bringing traditional talents together with new digital tools.
Pleshaw: How recently did you get involved with the Web?
Berman: In March, courtesy of the public library. I had a lot of spare time on my hands back then – my major activities included drinking coffee in the Aztec for hours on end and writing drafts of stories in long-hand in an endless series of spiral notebooks. That, and rehearsing with my band, Phydeaux III.
Pleshaw: Tell us a bit about your music projects.
Berman: Phydeaux III. We believe we are Santa Fe’s most sarcastic band – beating out the Swingin’ Bachelors by a nose.
Pleshaw: You guys do a great song about Allsup’s burritos. If you hum a few bars…
Berman: “They’re fast, they’re fried, they’re the cheap meal suggestion. And not only that, but they aid in digestion.”
Pleshaw: Cute. That sounds like the voice of experience.
Berman: Oh yeah. I don’t make fun of anything I don’t eat myself.
Pleshaw: You guys have played out a lot, eh?
Berman: We started out playing at…an unmentionable cafe. We had a steady gig at the Oasis for over a year, and we’ve played at Tribes, the Jean Cocteau, Doctor No, and the Old Santa Fe Music Hall. We get around.
Pleshaw: And would you like to share about Shocking Baby Secrets?
Berman: That’s my electronic solo collage act that sounds like a video game in a blender. It’s not live music – it doesn’t “exist” until it’s on tape. Sort of like atmospheric background music for the generation raised on Atari 2600 and Apple Jacks commercials. [A sample track of Shocking Baby Secrets will soon appear on the “Bagazine” compilation tape.] Solid Black Barcode is my new act – an all-stars thing consisting me and whoever I’m playing with at the time.
Pleshaw: You’ve also done some comic ‘zines since you’ve been here.
Berman: The first ‘zine I did here was called “The Genre Free Zone” and was a compilation of several comic artists doing their schtick. I was working at Bruce’s Comics when I did those – there were nine issues total.
Pleshaw: “Juxtaposition is Everything” is a pretty surreal little book, sort of like a “Too Much Coffee Man” without a storyline.
Berman: I think of it as like poetry comics. The title says it all – it’s like a Rorshact blot for people who read comics – the juxtaposition of words and images and lines produce different kinds of reactions from different people.
Pleshaw: And the “Santa Fe Funnybook”?
Berman: That was a collaboration with artist Jamie Chase. It focused on the little quirks of Santa Fe bohemian existence.
Pleshaw: And what are the ‘quirks of Santa Fe bohemia’?
Berman: Mindless conversations about the chupacabra. Anglos who’ve been here for two weeks discussing what Santa Fe *should* be doing about growth. We had a piece in there called “The Gaudalupe Triangle” which started with a simple premise: “Can a manic-depressive waitress find happiness in a city that makes no sense? Tune in, to the Gaudalupe Triangle…”
Pleshaw: Who was the model for that pieces?
Berman: It’s a Santa Fe archetype, actually. We all eat out in this town – they’re out there, but naming names might suggest that there’s only one – when, in fact, there are many.
Pleshaw: You’ve been working on various short stories and novels forever. What are they all about?
Berman: “Aztec Tales” consists of fifteen stories that are all beginning to overlap one another, so maybe it’s a meta-novel in the works. “1+1=0” is another series that I like to think of as Franz Kafka meets Saul Bellows.
Pleshaw: Uh, what does that mean?
Berman: The story is about this guy who wakes up in a hotel room with amnesia to discover a little man growing out of his ribcage.
Pleshaw: Sort of like “How to Get Ahead in Advertising”?
Berman: Yeah, but it’s not funny.
Pleshaw: Lately, you’ve been playing on the World Wide Web, developing the Aztec Street Cafe website.
Berman: That’s what I’m being groomed for. It’s going to be a really interesting site, filled with art, artists, music, animations and other STUFF. Like a big Santa Fe themed digital, globally accesible coloring book. We’re making it into a showcase for Santa Fe talent – we’re aiming for something entertaining.
Pleshaw: What are your goals these days with your work?
Berman: I’ve been looking for a way to pull all of my talents together under one roof, and the web seems like a good way to do that.
Pleshaw: In working on the web, do you ever feel like maybe you’re just indexing all of your work? In my experience, sometimes it seems like globally can sometimes means a lack of context…
Berman: Context isn’t all that important to my work – I believe there are references within my work that anyone could relate to – except maybe “the mainstream.”
Pleshaw: Whatever that is.
Berman: “Juxtaposition is Everything” affects different people in different ways – that’s half the fun. In the case of Phydeaux III, while the lyrics may be particular to Santa Fe, the music is weird enough that there’s got to be a web audience out there somewhere who would appreciate it.
Pleshaw: But will you continue to create and be involved in events and projects outside the machine?
Berman: Oh yeah. This is just a tool. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in front of a monitor – there is the outside world. Balance between the two can happen. Fortunately, I have ADD, so if I become compulsive, it’s only for a short period of time. That probably helps a lot.
Bret Berman hosts the Aztec Open Mic every Sunday night from 6-9pm.
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