It could be that this won’t bother many people, but I personally find it more than a little disturbing that these lines between reality and fantasy are not just blurred but increasingly erased.  Even beautiful people are commonly rendered unrecognizable as their former selves, and have been for quite some time—just check out this wildly popular Dove video from several years ago if you’d like to see the process.  Don’t you think any clear-headed person, at least anyone untainted by a marketing degree, would agree that the photo of the woman looks amazing without the Photoshop treatment?  I won’t get into it too much, but it’s my opinion we’d be a healthier society if marketers allowed for the use of “real” people in advertisements and presented a realistic body image to the public at large.  It’s a fruitless argument—that’s not where we are and we seem inexorably headed in the opposite direction—but I think it’s the right one.

I met Senator White at the end of 2009, when he was still a House Representative and I was asked to photograph him for an article about legislation he was proposing.  It was a bill that would make crimes against the homeless qualify as “bias-motivated attacks”, or hate crimes.  I photographed him under an I-5 overpass in Seattle, at the site of a homeless man’s murder that inspired his work on the issue.  It was a typical wet day.  I remember apologizing for asking him to stand in mud for the shoot, but he couldn’t have been happier to do it and he was glad to give me all the time I needed.  It was his nature to smile, I think—I asked him to keep a serious expression due to the nature of the bill highlighted in the article, but I could tell he found it difficult.

Since then, we bumped into each other several times at community functions.  The first time was quite a while after we shot together, and I didn’t even expect him to remember me, much less take the time to talk with me (there were plenty of people there more important than I).  But he came over and struck up a conversation, asked how things were, and told me that the article was up in his office, along with my photograph.  I asked him about the fate of the bill, and congratulated him on its passage.  I remember feeling glad that he was in Olympia, and it saddens me to think we’ve lost him.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ghosh recently when I was asked to photograph him for an article.  I wish we had more time (I only had about five minutes with the man), but it’s like they say—if wishes and buts were clusters of nuts, we’d all have a bowl of granola.  I’m quite happy with the results, and I’m not complaining.

I want one.

Step One: Get into shape.
I’ve never worked out in my life.  It’s never been a priority, so while I’ve always been thin (thanks, mom and dad), I’ve never looked like a street fighter before.  I wasn’t sure what I was in for, how long it would take to accomplish, or even exactly how to do it.  I wasn’t going to join a gym—nuts to that—and I wasn’t going to have a personal trainer.  No, I decided I could figure it out on my own.  Turns out, it’s super easy!  Yeah, all I had to do was run nearly every day for about a month, complete thousands of crunches, push-ups, and pull-ups, drink untold gallons of water, and quit alcohol, sugar, and all other foods I hold dear.  So, yeah.  Super easy.  I’d say it was a piece of cake, except I had to cut out cake, too.

Step Two: Visualize the photo.
With the hard part out of the way, I just thought about what I wanted the final shot to look like.  When you’re layering images, you need the camera angle, focal length, and lighting between the two photos to match as much as possible.  If they don’t, the photo is going to look fake, so everything has to be mapped out and planned ahead of time.  I decided on backlighting to get some hard rim lights on the crowd and myself, and a lower camera angle for that larger-than-life sort of feel.  I will often draw up a storyboard, even though I’m rubbish as an artist.  It just helps me understand better what I need for the shoot by way of location, lighting and other equipment, and in this case, models.

Awesome, right?  My career as a sketch artist never took off, but I still manage to get ideas on paper.

Step Three: Studio shoot.
I wanted some good makeup—black eye, bloody nose and eyebrow, torn chest, lots of sweat—so I enlisted the help of the terrifically talented Seattle makeup artist Lindsey Watkins.  We talked back and forth and swapped graphic images of brutally beaten people (totally fun in a sort of sick way), and settled on the look below.  I really couldn’t have been happier.  She’s some kind of sorceress, and great to work with.
There are certain considerations to address when doing this kind of thing.  When you know you’ll be cutting the subject out of a studio shot for compositing purposes, as is the case here, it behooves you (or whoever is doing your post work) to shoot on a background color that will make it—well, maybe not easy, but easier.  In this instance, because the background image would be very dark (in fact black in many parts) and because the rim lights would make my outline so bright and well-defined, I figured shooting on a solid black background would make it easiest when it came time to cut myself out of the picture.  If you’ll take a look at the image below, you’ll see what I mean.
Personally, I don’t think self portraiture is ever particularly easy, but if you shoot tethered to the computer it’s certainly less difficult.  Canon’s shooting software saves a lot of headache, and makes for a much smoother shoot.  Run over and hit the timer every time?  No fun.  Try to hide a remote in your hand?  No need.  Make your assistant do it?  No, thank you, Josh.  You can actually ask the computer to tell the camera to shoot every so often until you have as many frames as you want.  And if you ask it nicely, that’s exactly what it will do.

Step Four: Location shoot.
There are a lot of fences in town.  I wanted a batting cage because I thought it would fit in perfectly with that ultimate fighting, cage match sort of look.  Parks would have had them, but I didn’t want to contend with the public.  Inquisitive bystanders, obnoxious drunks, and the like are so distracting.  You can deal with them if you have to, but why would you choose to?  I was shooting in the evening, so I narrowed my search to schools.  I reasoned they would have such apparatus and be unattended at night.  After a bit of scouting, I found this perfect spot.

I was giddy.  It had everything I was looking for, including a cage shape, plenty of space behind for models and lights, and a great weathered look.  I very politely asked in the school’s office for permission to use the area—good thing, too, because I was visited during the shoot by a concerned maintenance man—and they very graciously said yes.  After the shoot, I returned with a thank-you of some apple walnut muffins I’d made.  We photographers are denied permission a fair amount (we seem to be suspect, I guess?), so I believe responses in the affirmative are to be appreciated.  Apparently, photographers need to engender some goodwill, and I’m happy to do it.  With muffins.
The shoot itself was a lot of fun.  I put out a call for my friends and their friends to come out if at all possible (Facebook has to be good for something), and promised them pizza (tax deductible) for their efforts.  In the end, I had more people than I could reasonably use—always preferable to the alternative.  I had them jumping and screaming and shouting, all in a residential neighborhood (right before the noise ordinances kicked in, of course), and they were able to enjoy the food after just about fifteen minutes in front of the camera.

Step Five: Photoshop.
The most significant Photoshop work done to the image was the darkening of the faces in the crowd.  I wanted their features to be only very barely visible, and not at all distracting.  I also removed the small sign in the center of the fence (you can see it in the photo above), and did a little dodging and burning where I thought it was necessary.  The studio shot, as you can see, was left pretty much as shot.  I was careful to keep all the hair as I stripped away the background (Photoshop CS5′s “Refine Mask” tool is a hell of a thing), but aside from the extraction, I mostly left the image alone.  If you compare the shot above to the final image, you’ll see I did a little dodging and burning here and there, but nothing major.  After dropping the self portrait onto the location shot and positioning and sizing it appropriately, I processed the whole image overall in a way that I liked.  Done and done.

The final image.  I have since enjoyed a lot of pie.

How can I tell you how I feel about the building?  Now more than a century old, 619 Western is all cement and wood and there’s not an ornate element to be found, but more than a hundred artists made that building their home away from home.  It was a vibrant and exciting community for artists of all kinds—painters, dancers, musicians, sculptors, woodworkers, clothing designers, and of course photographers—to say nothing of the city’s many artgoers.  An arts building since 1979 (the year I was born, coincidentally), it was also one of the largest art studio enclaves on the west coast.  It was, in fact, so magnificent in so many respects that it frankly made no difference to any of us that it was crumbling (I often likened it to a scone).  619 was an incredibly special place, and I can’t really express how fortunate I feel to have been a part of it for the last five years of its life.  I suspect Seattle’s art community will be feeling its loss for quite some time.  I know I will.

I’ll get to photos in just a minute, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the thing I’ll likely miss most about 619 Western.  On the first Thursday of each month, anyone and everyone could come out and enjoy work displayed in galleries and studios throughout downtown.  Other buildings were open those nights (and will continue to be), but 619 was absolutely, no question, hands down the place to be.  The monthly event was called ArtWalk, and 619′s stairs, hallways, and studios were always packed with people there to enjoy art.  You know, to be honest, given all the fire codes no doubt broken every time, I’m surprised the city never shut it down (seriously, if there had been an electrical short—not outside the realm of possibility at all—those that didn’t die in the fire would’ve certainly perished in the inevitable stampede on the only available set of stairs).
Artwork, music, wine, great friends, strangers, laughter, conversation, connection—I’ve never been in the middle of anything like it.  I will miss it terribly, and I’ll always have a warm place for it in my heart, right between thunderstorms and The Princess Bride.

Okay, photos.

This used to be my home away from home.  A lot of really wonderful things happened here.

A century of wear from a century of feet.

This crack in the cement is four or five inches wide.  Through it you can see into the north half of the building.  It’s not the only one—in fact, these cracks are so common throughout 619 that they were incorporated into the building’s logo (see above).  Unsafe, schmunsafe.

I always loved the back entrance.

Moments from an ArtWalk night.  Not the busiest we’ve ever had, but this was the night I set up the camera.

So long, 619 Western, and thank you.

lucienknuteson.com is dead.
Long live lucienknuteson.com!

(For those who aren’t familiar, Witkin is kind of a controversial figure.  You probably won’t want to click his name up there if you’re at all disturbed by photographs of cadavers, disembodied human parts—including heads—and physically deformed people.  Personally, I really don’t care for his work, but feel free to see how you feel about it.  Ya been warned.)