Author | Lightnews

ExhibitPhotoPDX

@exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social

540 followers 170 following 230 posts

A Federally-registered pirate with a long history of a good time. Also fairly obsessed with back roads, out-of-the-way places and finding out who YOU want to be today. Will claim to have driven almost every major dirt road in the PNW and beyond.

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ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · 7d

Music is such a joy, even when unlovely or perhaps unlistenable. The fact that someone had such an idiosyncratic vision is reason enough for it to exist.
More in the alt-text.
#piano #muse #music #vision
@jordanrivermuse.bsky.social

When I saw the piano on the side of the road with a "free" sign on it, I knew I had to have it. I didn't know the path it would take or how often I would revisit it in the future but here we are seven years later still seeing new things every time I look.

Jordan has been a constant creative companion for a decade now -- her emotional connection and restlessness is SO powerful and I hope to continue finding moments with her as long as we can. She is absolutely magnificent.

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ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · 10d

The sun lowers earlier, the wind wraps around the house and pries at the corners of the doors. Which reminds me of a late-winter expedition with @lucyartmodel.bsky.social who is an absolute inspiration every day. #light #shadow #nudeart #oregonphotographer #whiteroom.
More in the alt-text.

How do I recall it? We had been out clambering around a deserted power plant and a frozen waterfall all day and our little ranch retreat turned out to be a crazy-alabaster place that lent itself neatly to some stark contrasts. Later I'd discover that the owner was a talented go-getter rebuilding her family legacy by hosting everything from raves to fly fishing on their properties and was part of my extended hippie-friend-family. Small world.
It's become kind of amusing that all I can see when I go back to look at these shoots is what I SHOULD have done. It's never obvious in the moment but seems so clear in retrospect. But then there's the reimagining and the re-edit and something new and unexpected starts to click and I like what we did. Sometimes a lot. I've spent hours and hours pouring over these images and every time I learn a new tool or technique it's fun to come back and see how that new interpretation changes the way I feel about a set of images. Freakin' amazing, this little adventure is.

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ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · 20d

Just a few blocks away from where I type there is an inflatable frog facing off against armed thugs who have not yet found their sense of shame and had the good sense to quit. We are the people and we will win this fight. We place our heads on the chopping block deliberately. We resist.

I had borrowed a low-lying fog machine ("low-lying" is a type) and it never occurred to me as I poured gallon after gallon of water into the machine that all that water was actually GOING SOMEWHERE.....which happened to be every piece of fabric and very much the carpet. LOL.

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · 22d

Morning without coffee is like sleeping in clothes.

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · 24d

Points to Dominante Magazine for....well...for being FRENCH, all the more exotic since America has become a Puritanic wasteland of retarded intellect. Big points to the wonderful Lumi for following up and making this shoot finally happen! #pnwlife #oregonphotographer #roadtrip

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · 25d

Hmmmmm.....I realized that @jordanrivermuse.bsky.social is starting to make up an awful lot of my feed here. We go back quite a bit now and I continue to be so very impressed with her as a candid, engaged and emotional force.

More in the alt-text. #spooky #darkart #grotesque #pdxphotographer

While there have been distinct phases to my photography, I think the through line is simply my relationships with women and a sort of therapy around that. I began model photography after seeing aerial dancers moving through patterns of light and fitting out a spare room in my warehouse to experiment with this idea. Coincidentally I was undergoing personal upheaval and for a while my friends gently pointed out that I was portraying women as monsters.

Jordan, among others, was instrumental in providing stepping stones to a fuller emotional range. Over the previous decade I had become cut off from my female friends and I needed to reconnect and relearn my communication. I have always had a lot of great positive reinforcement with crew and clients but to explore intimacy as an artistic form was new territory. Hell, making "art" was new to me in this format.

Growing up in the Pacific NW had insulated me from a lot of casual misogyny. My mother ran a business and my grandmother had run a business. I grew up with women being equal by default, without much discussion. It seemed normal to me but my foray into model photography coincided with a cultural shift that has seen that normalcy attacked.

I grew up in a conservative home but not a stupid one. My parents were modest but not prudish. I've never seen nudity as inherently sexual and nude art has always been accepted as a cornerstone of human art. We come from women. We all have mothers and sisters, wives and lovers. The erotic, the nurturing, the spiritual and the beautiful are all bound up in women's bodies.

Should we treat women differently? Maybe. But when we think of the inward rigors of pregnancy we should build comforting nests for the baby and the mother to commune with each other. To me that implies placing healthcare and reproductive rights in a central position in order to make every pregnancy a wanted one.

Child rearing is not, in and of itself, a gender role. Men and women and aunties and cousins and grandparents all play different roles and are perfectly capable of playing whatever role is necessary for their child in their circumstance. I grew up with a working mother who taught me how to answer the phone and the importance of her work to our family. Those lessons stick with me today.

I won't pretend to have definitive answers to some questions or even posit that there ARE definitive answers. But respect for others and their choices seems like a great place to start and giving every person the support and resources to be their best selves would seem to follow.

The human form is capable of communication. It can be tortured. It can be lithe. We can bend ourselves to express loneliness or weariness or leap into the sky with joy or anticipation or resistance. Capturing those things is a wild path of little adventures to create moments that support people as they communicate with themselves and the world around them. I'm deeply touched and honored at the adventures the past decade has brought and pretty proud of the work that's come out of it. I still struggle with how to present it and how it was captured in the moment. Sometimes I want to go back and have a do-over so that I can do it better but every time I try it seems to be a different moment and we wind up with something new. Ce la vie.

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ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · 25d

One thing led to another and all of a sudden I am hours deep into rethinking my edit approach to this entire shoot.

More in the alt-text.

#americantrucking #piano #wet

The light from the mostly-translucent roof was an amazement as soon as I rolled up the back door. The piano, a roadside score that I had turned around to haul aboard, sat there in what I could only think of as a semi-illuminated murk. If I have a weakness it involves dim light and pale, nearly glow-in-the-dark, women. I promptly called two of them and spent the next couple days diving into this whole thing. Eight years later I am still returning to the files and finding new ways to think about the edits.

Fun fact, this piano wound up in an art gallery and eventually was gutted and reimagined as a fire-producing honky-tonk attraction in Portland's Pioneer Square during the Winter Light Festival. One of the crew on that remarked on the distinct scent of coconut that he had noticed inside the piano.

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ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · 26d

I'm so glad that there's a place for nipples. It BOTHERS me no end to leave them out as if society itself will come to a screeching halt should we realize that women possess such a thing. Not shown? The three busloads of Catholic elementary children who arrived moments later....

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ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 30

Are there questions to be answered? Banished to the wilderness. #pacificnw #pnwsummer #pnwphotographer #camping #followthemuse

I asked her how she was feeling and she walked to the edge of the water and drew a handful of mud with her hand and began daubing it on herself. "Like this," she replied, some time later.

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ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 21

End of Seasons.

I had a delightful dinner at a seasonal pop-up, homemade Puerto Rican in a tiny shop at the end of a dock on the sun-kissed Columbia River. More (and more maudlin, perhaps) in the alt-text.

#pnwphotographer #seasons #autumn #rain #wilting

Now that I've seen and spent time with the Mississippi I can't unsee the comparison. I have lived with the Columbia as an example of "a river" -- blue or steel grey, a slight rise and fall with the distant tides, a stately sweep. The Big Muddy lives up to its name and that roiling, churning brown carrying the remains of the Midwest toward the Gulf of Mexico is distinctive. Powerful. Menacing. As "mighty" as the Columbia undeniably IS, it rarely has menace unless in full wild flood. It's a very West Coast vibe. Lots of recreation, inviting to hang out around and maybe plunge into. I cannot imagine a resident of New Orleans thinking that they should go down to the banks and jump into the Miss.

So there we were enjoying the last sunny day of summer. My companion was telling me that she has been taking firefighting training through a community program and I was reminded that I admire her for her level-headedness. The past five years she has turned her attentions to carpentry and wood-working, masonry and now community response. Damn. Prepping for The Apocalypse in the most practical manner.

I'm on the bleeding-edge of GenX, a few years earlier and I'd have been the back end of the Boomers. Glad not to be because I blame the Boomers for a lot of our current problems. Not individually, so much, but the social pressures and vagaries of history combined to leave them holding the bag of dissolution across a number of areas. And I've had a ringside seat to the end of things from public telephones to car culture to, apparently, America itself.

My dinner companion and I share an instinctive feeling about politics, at least in that we disapprove of grifters and shitheels. Perhaps that extends to a sorrow at the state of gullibility we have achieved as a nation. I used to think that some disdain or the stupid was part of my fundamental conservatism but maybe it's just that I'm a snob. SHE, on the other hand, seems to be more accepting of her fellows and more gracefully forgiving of their foibles. She's a bridge-builder and I admire that quite a bit. It's more constructive than my snobbery.

The air itself had a finality behind the warmth. Autumn is coming and the trees along the boulevards have begun to show signs of change. The backyard harvest has been good this year and despite having never watered the apple trees their fruit is less woody, more delicious, than I had any right to expect. The pears I'm still not sure how to approach but a bumper crop of cherries, grapes and figs rounds out the yard.

Is this the last year of easy food? Can the American ag-industry swap to robot harvesting in time to seamlessly replace the workers we are turning away? Will Medicaid recipients flock to the fields in such numbers that the harvests will be successful? I'm seeing little bits and pieces about this (mainly very negative) in niche journalism but nobody seems to be talking about the idea that we built our economy on the labor of the undocumented. Cheap labor to keep cheap food on American tables. Add in tariffs and collapsing international markets and it sure seems that we're going to face some interesting food problems next year. Maybe we'll all get thin again?

So I found myself in between rain squalls on a hillside of fading grass. A heavily-trafficked tourist spot that was somehow eerily vacant. The mood was fitting and I feel like we captured an emotion. Successes of the day are never to be regretted.

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Reposted by ExhibitPhotoPDX

Governor JB Pritzker @govpritzker.illinois.gov · Sep 19

Unlike Donald Trump, most Americans believe in the ideals on which our nation was founded.

Now is the time to stand up for those noble ideals.

Be loud — for America.

Governor Pritzker’s op-ed for The Contrarian.

83 510 2.2K

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 19

People still have television? LOL.

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 19

Who ARE they? I’ve never heard of either?

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 14

It's been a long week and dragging myself out to pursue something simply for pleasure seemed, at 6am, like a bad idea. It was not. It really wasn't. #nude #waterfall #pdxphotographer #moment

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ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 9

Light bounces off the upper cliffs as we wade upstream.
#nude #hiking #pnw #oregon

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ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 9

Well, I definitely see myself as the piratical raconteur of my own storyline but the rest of it seems more negative than the name would indicate. The incel thing...I dunno...maybe I'm too old for it to be understandable. We were nerds and I knew some seriously withdrawn people but not like this.

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 7

One of those days where I'm running out of morning leisure and wanted to write a few things down. I've been using a (German?) website as a repository for some occasional thoughts and when I wandered over there....it was...gone? I can't get in. I can't find myself. More in the alt-text.

I'm not enough of a techie to know what this means. The website simply refuses me. Meh. Easy come, easy go. But over the last couple years I did manage to write quite a bit there and the "loss" of those thoughts is disconcerting.

Thoughts tumble out frequently, though. I've annoyed a number of partners with first-thing-in-the-morning-musings. My brain apparently switches in slightly before my eyes open, usually on the heels of some dramatic and exhilarating dreamscape. Surely we can recover those fleeting thoughts or something very much like them. These aren't mathematical solutions to deeply complex problems, after all. More just pleasant words strung in series, adding weight to one another until the whole sentence hopefully moves from rhetoric to some kind of reality.

Occasionally I run into authors whose words gather and gain on the page. It is a visceral pleasure to repeat and roll the words across my tongue and say them aloud several times. Words are gorgeous in the right hands.

Of all the models I've worked with over the decade, Jordan might be the physical shell that I find most compelling. She's a dancer but more in an emotional sense than a highly-technical one. Her body is stunningly curvaceous and well-proportioned for the fantasies of photography, the kind of feminine that expresses and exemplifies the physics of womanhood. My personal taste might run elsewhere but when she is connected to the camera I think she is absolutely perfect joining the emotional and physical.

Every so often I glance at the time in the corner of the screen. Our last concert of the season is today and I should be clinging to sleep this morning because I stayed up too late last night and it's a long day ahead with uncertain weather and a high-needs band. Oy vey. But then I glanced through this work with Jordan from last winter and was off on a burst of energy. Better than coffee.

I could be wrong but I see Jordan as a seeker. Perhaps her emotions don't sit comfortably in her body and our best work explores that process for her. I've seen her work with others and seen hints of her journey. Maybe the reason it resonates so much is that it's OUR journey -- we all want to integrate our passions with our bodies and feel whole in ways that modernity seems to deny us. Maybe. Maybe humans are, a la Hedwig, always torn apart, always seeking their other parts. It's not the craziest idea.

And now I'm singing that delicate little couplet from Hedwig. "We put our arms round each other, shove ourselves back together...the origin of love...the origin of love".

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 7

I don't want to mock these guys but that fundamental failure to see other people as people speaks to some really messed-up underlying problems. At this point, however, I don't think we can say that it's an individual problem. It's so pervasive and so obviously linked to societal choices...

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ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 4

Now we know why they still talk about some of the Roman emperors.

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 4

Nope, on a computer. This link totally works but the original just took me to a blank blogspot page. Fascinating story about the ship! Thank you!

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 3

It's too bad I can't read the name of the blog -- clicking the link just takes me to a main page that doesn't allow a search. I even joined but can't figure out how to find anyone else. It's like locking myself into a padded cell and yelling. Interesting format, that.

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 3

Is this the Senate version of "thoughts and prayers"?

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 3

One rambling cabin in the dark woods on a dark day. One bright light in the middle of the room. What ghosts emerge?

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 3

I am livid at the deconstruction of the Nation by these gadabouts and fools. The idea of party and a man above the country is tantamount to treason. The stupidity and venality is just the icing on the cake.

ExhibitPhotoPDX @exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social · Sep 3

Magic moments in the deep woods of the Oregon Coast. It's enough to make me believe in faeries!

I am reminded that the all we need for magic is a little corner without adults and a pocketful of whimsy. Maybe a few feet of fabric.

#oregon #environmentalnude

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