Chapter Twenty Three
I started a commercial recording studio of my own in an old chiropractic office and set up a photo studio in the back.
I had been an amateur figure photographer since Geneva, and now wanted to try my hand at becoming a great and famous one.
I, like many folks in America, was a regular reader of Playboy and, occasionally, Penthouse.
I actually bought them for the pictures!
While they published highly stylized pictures of their models, I wanted to publish a "coffee-table" tome of sensual photography of everyday women without editorial content.
The pictures would speak for themselves and of the moods of the subjects.
Stretch marks were just as valid a part of a woman as were her breast and genital configuration.
I wanted women to model who were real. I wanted the lopsided, the elongated, the over-thin and the over-weight.
I wanted to capture each one in all her femininity and glory as a sentient, sensual being who was aware of her womanhood and proud she was attractive in her own special way.
Personally, I've always been more attracted to the non-stereotypical beauty in women. After all, how many Playboy Bunny/Penthouse Pets are there living next door?
Real women have beautifully asymmetrically shaped breasts. They have stretch marks. They're pudgy or skinny or too long-legged or have no waists or their bite is off or their noses are too large or their feet are too knobby or... and on and on.
Just like men.
And yet...they're beautiful in their own way. Men date them and they fall in love and marry them and have families with them.
They're turned on, aroused, by them.
They're dreamt of on lonely nights. They're real and I wanted to photograph that reality.
I wanted to capture the beauty and glorify it sans air brush or fancy darkroom techniques.
I'd shot my first glamour shots in Geneva when I was 17. I had met a Dutch girl named Carla and was at her home photographing her for her grandmother back in Holland. We'd taken a break from the shooting and were relaxing with some hot chocolate when I spilled some and went in the bathroom to wash my hands. On the hook on the back of the door was a diaphanous pink negligee. It smelled wonderful, like a woman smells when she's all sleepy warm and feminine.
I was still a virgin at the time and, though I’d had a bit of serious petting experience, didn't know too many women when they were all sleepy warm and feminine, but that's how it smelled nonetheless.
Jokingly I asked her to model it for me and I'd shoot the rest of the roll in the camera.
To my surprise she did!
When I got the pictures back from the lab they were all marvelous.
The “glamour” shots were outstanding and, for the first time in my life, I realized, intellectually, I was talented at something artistic.
Carla ordered quite a few reprints, including some of the innocently sexy negligee shots, and set them back to Holland to rave reviews.
I now knew I wanted to start doing nudes. All I had to do was find a model who'd pose for me.
American's are raised with a major dose of Puritanism no matter what their religion. Europeans aren't burdened with that baggage: remember, it was the protestors who left Europe to found their own religion of repression elsewhere in the New World.
It took me a while to understand that nudity wasn't a big bad thing there in Europe.
Switzerland is a conservative nation but the religious hang ups about nudity and sexuality didn't seem to exist as strongly as on this side of the ocean.
I found Judith, an artist’s life model, within a few weeks and we set up a shoot.
Dressed, she was a plain-jane but nude she, somehow, came alive and radiated beauty without adding makeup.
The only trouble I had was getting her long golden brown hair to hang where I wanted it.
Over the next year and a half I took hundreds of rolls of film of at least 50 women.
When I returned to the states a few months after the Porsche accident with Ippy in France I learned from American Express that they had lost one of the larger boxes I had shipped home.
Months later I received a letter which had been delayed in getting to me and learned the box had been found: I could redeem it by paying a fee (which was absurd since I'd already paid to have it shipped to Dallas in the first place), or it would be sold at auction at a date that had come and gone by the time I received the notice.
In that box were not only some minor photographic equipment, but all the prints and negatives I had shot in Europe as well as personal belongings and memorabilia of my European theatrical experiences.
Lesson: Good eggs belong in many baskets.
Now, in Amarillo, just over a decade later, I wanted to start again and see if I could build up a workable style I could use for the book.
Jeanette was always amazed at how easily I got models.
I told her I was honest with them: I told them I was an amateur photographer and I'd like to do nude studies of them.
I assured them I wasn’t a talent scout for Playboy or any other magazine and I wouldn't show the pictures to anyone who wasn't a model like them. If they wanted, I'd provide them with prints of any pictures they wanted to keep, at no charge.
And I kept my word.
I never got model’s releases, either, so the work I did was practice.
On average two out of every five women I approached agreed to model nude. Some it took time to convince but when they saw my work they were impressed I wasn't a dirty old man out for his jollies.
Although jollies were not unknown on an occasional shoot.
It could be an admittedly erotic situation: warm lights, an appreciative male, and a woman completely naked.
I always maintained the most professional of attitudes with my models, but sometimes there would be an indication she was becoming aroused by the situation.
On an average shoot the model and I would spend several hours together talking about anything that came up while I occasionally posed her or draped material or rearranged her hair.
Mostly I allowed her to find her own “places”.
Once in a very rare while a session would lead to sex.
It was always clearly understood and agreed the shoots were intended to be sensuous and sexual in atmosphere.
But I never betrayed any of my models and to this day have kept their photos out of the public view.
It must be injected here that early in our marriage, Jeanette and I agreed it would be an “open” marriage, quite common at the time. We agreed each could engage in physical relationships outside the marriage, but that we wouldn’t discuss them, contrary to the premise of the open marriage philosophy.
One woman agreed to model only if I promised to do something about her lazy eye. She said she never took good pictures and I explained it all depended on the photographer.
Most studio situations are sterile, formatted atmospheres: go in, pay a fee, hit a few stock poses lit with standard lighting and then out of there.
I was constantly moving floodlights (I couldn't afford strobes) and changing backdrops and suggesting poses, though the model’s own natural selections and positioning was more what I was after.
A session could last 2-3 hours. And mostly we'd talk. About everything. After awhile my model would feel comfortable with herself and relax.
I never started them off nude. We always worked towards it. When they were relaxed I'd have them change clothes.
Then, slowly, we'd decrease the amount of covering until they were nude. By then they felt at home and less inhibited.
My lazy-eye model and I worked for several hours and I found she looked more relaxed when I was higher than her head shooting down at her. By getting her to look upwards at the camera she was forced to open her eye more.
The shots came out beautifully and she and her family thanked me profusely. She'd never had a photographer work with her problem until then.
I was developing my style and think I might have found it. I called the sessions "Mood Photography" because I was always looking to capture the model's mood right at the moment I shot a frame.
It was not uncommon for the women to comment they were glad they’d now have mementoes of how they looked when they were younger...a great many of them having already passed their twenties.
I’ve always been attracted to older women.
Some of the resultant studies were quite intriguing in their sincerity. And not one of the models would ever be considered for any of the current crop of "men's magazines", though each of them came across genuinely more beautiful and sensually alive than any 10 of the models in those publications.
Lesson: Trust is its own reward.
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