Webster’s Dictionary defines an odyssey as, “a long journey with adventures.” To me there is much room for interpretation within that definition. How long must the journey be? Or, how many random adventures must occur within a tour to properly qualify it as an “odyssey?”
In the spring of 2005 I was sitting in my office reveling in the fact that a short film about my photographic experiment, “The Beauty Project,” had just won “Best Documentary” in it’s first film festival appearance. Not only that, but I was busily printing and framing a 25-piece series from the project. This would be my first public exhibition of the work that I had been creating for the past couple of years. It was all very exciting at that time in my life!
Getting back to the short film, while it was being received with an overwhelmingly positive response from audiences, it was also met with comments like, “It’s too short,” “We would like to see more,” and, “What’s next?” While I was all too ready to give people more of my work, I knew that I needed to push the boundaries I wanted to achieve in order to make it more exciting on a grander scale like a feature-length film. I began to dissect my project in hopes of finding a path to the next higher level.
I have been a photographer for a very long time. I won my first camera at the age of nine at a friend’s birthday party. I started photographing anything and everything and soon took to shooting with the 35mm camera my father used when he was younger. It was also then that I got my own darkroom set-up and began printing all of my black and white images from home. Since those days I’ve continued to shoot whether it is nature, people, weddings or eventually assignments as a combat correspondent in the Untied States Marines.
Long before the exhibits, publications and films about the Beauty Project there was an idea. It was an idea for one particular image that stewed in the back of my mind for many years. There was a freeway overpass that I used to cross almost daily on my way to and from work. Something about this particular spot always struck me as being a great location for a time-lapse nighttime photograph, shot from above with the passing car lights blurred below. The kicker was that there would be a nude person in the foreground, clinging to the fence, and she would be in focus while everything below was not.
At that point in my life I had shot nearly every type of subject imaginable, except the nude human body. I didn’t care to go out and shoot nudes just for the sake of shooting nudes, but the freeway overpass shot was something I thought would be incredible. Sometimes in life, you can just do what you want, and sometimes because of other circumstances you have to compromise. Back then I was in a marriage that would not have been the most conducive environment to start shooting images of the nude human form. So I compromised my vision and let the idea simmer.
Years later, I found myself out of the Marines, working as a loan officer in the mortgage business and single. I also was starting to exhibit some of my landscape and abstract work and began thinking about different ways to expand my portfolio. It was around then that I happened to drive across the same overpass from years before when the idea boiled over and I thought; “I can shoot this picture now!”
How does one go about finding a person to model nude for them? This was my first obstacle and it was a big one. I had never approached anyone to model nude for me before, much less outdoors at night on the side of the road with cars passing by. I ran the idea by a friend of mine and we began brainstorming who might be interested in something like this. To my surprise, the first few people we asked said, “yes,” and before I knew it, I was out on that overpass shooting the picture that was about seven years in the making.
I do not know if it was because of the path that had been traveled to finally create this image, or because that it was so perfect and exactly how I had imagined it, but something triggered in my brain and it’s safe to say I became singularly focused with this new form of nighttime nude photography. Everything became a possibility. Not just blurring cars, but airplanes, fountains, boats and anything else I saw became backdrops for my images. The original models kept volunteering for more shoots. Their friends saw the pictures and wanted some for themselves. Eventually I began networking online and within a little over a year I had photographed more than a hundred people and the simple idea for the freeway overpass picture evolved into the Beauty Project. Everything is shot on traditional black and white film and processed and printed using the same darkroom equipment I’ve had for 20 years.
It was then that I collaborated with a filmmaker friend of mine to make a short documentary about the project. We had been talking for quite a while about making a film about something, anything, when I offered up my own work as a subject. I contacted a few of the people I’d photographed before and asked them if they wanted to shoot again, only this time have it documented for the film. We also decided to interview each model about their experiences with the shoots and then dove deeper into their thoughts on how beauty is expressed in American culture today. The film was, as I stated earlier, a hit with audiences, and also opened my eyes to the fact that while I was just trying to create beautiful images, some of the people I was photographing were having self-proclaimed, life altering experiences during the shoots.
I examined all aspects of what my project had become in order to decide the next direction to go with it. I knew I wanted to keep shooting new people. I knew I wanted to make a feature-length film about the work. I wanted the pictures exhibited in galleries. I wanted to have my own coffee table book. So I decided to create a project that would incorporate everything into one. I decide to make a challenge out of it.
I am often asked if my work is digital, or if the effects with light I achieve are done with a computer. When most people find out that it is all done on film, using traditional techniques they are quite surprised. The fact that it is all time-lapse at night only adds to the mystique. This served as the basis for my challenge.
I decided to take a standard roll of film, 24 exposures, and attempt to take one picture per day in a different state for 24 days in a row until I finished the roll of film. I would bring a camera crew along to document everything for a film. It would be the “perfect” roll of film in a day and age where digital is trying to be king. This was a challenge indeed.
I spent about three months getting organized; assembling a crew and booking models in the cities we were visiting on this 9,000-mile journey around the country. On September 1st, 2005 I took the first picture in San Francisco, California on a roll of Kodak T-Max 100 film. It was the first picture of my odyssey.
