This and the posts to follow have been a long time coming. When I first wanted to write about this it was a year and a half into the pandemic. A lot had happened and it also felt like absolutely nothing had happened. It was a weird limbo. A slow apocalypse - as I’d been “joking” with friends.
I’ve always felt like I don’t want to just write for the sake of writing, but to at least attempt to say something useful when doing so, but perhaps that is besides the point? Maybe writing and putting things out into the world is the point, whether I find it useful or not? But I digress.
In 2020 I was asked by my friend Stuart Trent to photograph him for a portrait idea he had in mind. He had seen the “Crying Men” series by Sam Taylor-Johnson and that is what sparked the idea for him.
We then got together one morning in November of 2020 behind his little framer/art gallery to make the portrait.
Before this even became a full fledged project my thoughts were - to have it feel even more vulnerable - that I would want him to sit without a shirt on, to give a perceived physical “nakedness” along with the emotional nakedness. Stuart would then sit with whatever emotion or feeling he would need to cry. In this instance it was a song that reminded him of his mother played on a loop as I waited for the appropriate moment to click the shutter.
This all sparked the larger idea to photograph men between the ages of 24 and 65 to come and sit for me and to talk about our feelings if that is what the sitter chose to do. For everyone it is different. Some want to talk, others need a song or a sight or a smell. Different senses to get to a place where the “dam walls” break and the facade we put up comes down and we can be truly human and vulnerable with one another. It is not an easy task and I am grateful for everyone who has sat and spoken to me about difficult things or shared something quietly without words. Those were sometimes the most powerful sittings for me and I hope for them as well.
I have several more of these portraits to share and will do small write-ups about them and my experience in retrospect. Most of them have been posted to my Instagram already, but I thought it a good idea to write about them here as well.
Thanks for reading. The following words are from Stuart.
While visiting my brother in Sydney Australia in 2006, we attended an exhibition of photos taken by
Sam Taylor-Wood. They were all photos of famous actors. They moved me (I was not a big crier).
Over the last 16 years I often think back to the exhibition.
Exhibition, 23 March – 21 May 2006, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA)
Three people very close to me died over a two-year period (3 rd January 2019 to 31 December 2020). I
had never truly understood loss as I do now (age 49). Time heals, but I cry often. “All’s changed
since”. (from the 3 rd verse of the poem referenced below)
Since 2009 artists know to me and my Gallery have been doing portraits of me. There are about 310
of them now. I approached Bernard to take a photo of me to represent this time of loss in my life, so
it could form part of the collection of portraits.
I attach the first verse of William Butler Yeats poem, The Wild Swans at Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.