I’m currently taking a photography class and I have already taken an art photography course. I enjoy photographing people raw. Raw, as in pure and untouched, yet still showing stains of broken lines and pain. Sometimes they’re beautiful. Sometimes they’re downright crap, but I’m still learning and exploring with new mediums.
Photography to me, means capturing a moment of infinity and hiding its’ authenticity with my own experiences and thoughts.
I need models, if anyone is interested please send me an e-mail at selopez168@yahoo.com. I am looking for creative and very open minded people.
Joel-Peter Witkin is most definitely an inspiration and a muse to say the least.
The above picture is entitled, “Glass Man,” by Joel-Peter Witkin.
Here is a short essay that he wrote about the photo:
“We’re born naked. We actually should live naked–not literally, but in terms of honesty and openness. I’ve seen hundreds of people on the slab, and occasionally I see a beautiful woman, who is still beautiful–and it’s very, very shocking. It has an impact, because you’re seeing human remains, a human life, or the evidence of it.
I stayed in Mexico City for four extra days when I was making Glass Man, because I wasn’t getting the bodies I wanted. When bodies are brought in from the street, there’s sometimes a doubt as to how the person died. Street people may be found days later, which makes it hard to determine the cause.
Drivers from the morgue make runs every day in white trucks to pick up the dead. When found, the bodies are just thrown on the gurneys, face-down. Their noses get broken. The trucks are loaded with maybe six people, and they just lie on top of each other, somewhat bloated. They’re all stretched out. Their identities are taken, their clothes are taken away, and records are kept.
When I stayed those extra days in Mexico, I knew something was going to happen. I got a call. Four men were picked up, the last run, on the last day before I was going to leave. I went down to the hospital with my interpreter and went in to shoot. One guy had been run over by a car, not in good shape. The other guy was an old man, no good. One man had been stabbed to death. None of these guys had his nose broken, because they took the trouble not to do that, for me. The other guy, he was a real punk, nothing good visually.
For some people, the evidence of their spirit is either there or not there in death. Nonetheless, when I saw this last guy, I said, “I want him.” This was just about Christmas-time, so the Mexicans were outside celebrating, getting ready to take their vacations.
I’m in this room with a dead guy. I’m propping him up, and I put a fish in his hand as a kind of prop, and I’m checking the lighting. Then I get that straight, and I take a few photographs, just as a kind of a record. Then I make arrangements to have the guy autopsied. And as soon as he’s being autopsied, he starts changing! He’s on the table, and he’s changing. I turn to my Mexican translator, who is a very, very bright man, and we have seen the same thing. He says, “He’s being judged. This guy is being judged right now.” Suddenly, he’s not a punk any more. He’s gone through this kind of transfiguration on the table, on the autopsy table. I say to the technician, “Don’t wash him down. I want all the blood from the suturing.” Usually, they open up the skull and remove the brain. Sometimes they put the brain back. Other times they put a piece of towel or paper in there, or perhaps the Daily News–to maintain the form of the flesh. In this case they put the brain back . When they were carrying the brain, I said, “Look at this brain–it may have contained thoughts of evil, but however he was judged, he is now a different presence!”
When I got him back, and I put him in this room, I got him on this chair, and I photographed him sitting down. Then I spent an hour and a half with him, and after that, he looked like a Saint Sebastian. He looked like a person who had grace. His fingers, I swear to God, had grown 50 percent. They were elegant. They were the longest fingers on a man I’ve ever seen. It was as if they were reaching for eternity.” -Joel-Peter Witkin
