I made a trip to Ohio last week to visit my good friend Dave Levingston. I had been there several times before, but what was different about this trip was that I drove there, rather than going by air. I think this was the longest distance I’ve ever driven in a single day – about 630 miles, done in nearly 12 hours – topping my previous long drive from Brunswick, Maine to Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Sadly, this trip originated as a happy one but ended up being bittersweet. My primary reason for going was to see the six photos of mine that were put up on display at an art gallery close to where Dave lives. I had visited the gallery quite a few times on earlier visits, and when I was there six months ago, I brought along a bunch of 11x14 fiber prints with me, to show to Rob, the gallery owner. He selected six of them that he liked, which he later matted, framed and put up on the wall. It was those that I was going to see.

Tragically, Rob passed away from cancer just a few weeks ago and his family closed the gallery. So, rather than going to see the photos on display, I instead went to pick them up to take them home.

Still, it was a positive trip overall, with both the company of a good friend and the opportunity to photograph some nudes in different locations. One model I worked with was Kelsey Dylan (who I like to call “Kelsey Zimmerman,” or “Zimmy,” for short), who had stayed with me here in New York the week before I left and accompanied me on the long drive out to Ohio, her home state. We had been taking turns choosing songs to play on my iPod, but when we crossed the border from Pennsylvania into Ohio, we stopped what we were listening to and put on an appropriate song for the occasion by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young:

“Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in O-hi-o.”

I had never worked with Kelsey before, and Dave was good enough to take me to a couple of beautiful locations that he had used previously. The day before I photographed her, Dave did a studio session with her, during which time I went out on location to photograph Revielle, who I had worked with in Dave’s studio on my previous visit in February. I worked with Kelsey the following day.

Last Thursday, August 19, was a special day for me as I celebrated my 15th anniversary of photographing nudes. (See my previous blog post to read about that.) So, I went out with Dave and model Jypsie Nahmana to do a 15th anniversary photo shoot. I had photographed Jypsie, along with another model, at the very same location in February. The big difference was that there was snow covering everything and it was freezing cold back then. This time, thankfully, the temperature was a bit warmer and more conducive to being nude outdoors.


All of my serious photos from these sessions were made with medium format black & white film, but I did make a few quick snapshots of the models with my little pocket digital camera, which you can see here. I was going to put one of the nudes at the top, but I’ve decided to dedicate this post to Dave L to thank him for his hospitality in allowing me to stay with him for several days and for taking me out to a few beautiful spots for photography.

Therefore, you’re seeing the face of "The Beard" (as some of us like to call Dave) at the top. He had asked me to take a few photos of him at his studio as he wanted some new portraits, and as he was wearing a black shirt, I asked him to stand in front of a black background to try to achieve the ‘floating head’ look. I think I succeeded here, with the aid of some burning in with Photoshop, to reach that. He’s illuminated by some of the very nice window light that his studio gets.

The other photo of Dave shows him standing on a rock with a waterfall in the background, during our outing with Kelsey. As I have noted before elsewhere, Dave is the photographer who invented the genre of photographing naked chicks on rocks, so I think it only appropriate that he be photographed on a rock himself. (Thankfully he’s not nude. Trust me on this one.)

Sometimes, you look at a photo and you just don’t think too much of it. Then, when you have the chance to look at it again, you think better of it.

Such is the case with this photo here. I took the photo in a small town in northern Vietnam called Phutho. It was just a stop on the way from Sapa in the hills down to Hanoi in 2006.

I guess I liked the photo enough to scan it, though typically I do that only seeing the negative without a contact sheet. (The scan, in effect, allows me to see it as a positive.) Even though I scanned it, I must have not thought of it enough to prepare it for web posting.

Lately, though, I’ve been going through my scanned images in preparation for making postings to the new website that I’m working on. Looking at this image, perhaps more carefully than I did before, I realized that I liked it more than I did previously. It still shows an older woman with a hat and a wrapper around her head.

What really appeals to me now are the two onlookers in the background. Just look at the face of the man (her husband?) standing back there. I mean, his face is positively beaming with pride that I have selected the woman as a subject to photograph. The smiling young woman adds a nice touch to the image, too.

Perhaps that’s one reason why I like going to southeast Asia. People there often seem generally flattered to be photographed, at times becoming the point of conversation for the people around them.

It makes me think about something written by a noted landscape photographer who likes to work in Japan. In that country, he wrote, nobody ever hassles him about taking photographs – unlike in the United States, where some folks have threatened to blow his head off if he didn't pack up his camera and leave.

Untitled Nude, 2002, #5

I’m going to step out of my normal routine of posting photos of mine, sometimes with an explanation of how I made it, in favor of writing about something else: censorship.

I’ve been thinking this over today, and it seems to be that perhaps there are two types of censorship. One of those is where a particular type of expression is clearly and plainly prohibited. For example, in the Soviet Union, taking photos of soldiers on duty was prohibited. You may not agree with it, but at least you know exactly what the rule is. The line not to be crossed is clearly drawn.

Then there’s the type of censorship that’s harder to get a handle on. These are the types of prohibitions where the lines not to be crossed are not so clearly drawn, due to vague wording (sometimes intentionly so) of the rules.

In these cases, the question then becomes, “Where do I put that line in practice?” A lot of that depends on what the penalty is for crossing the line. In the case of Federal regulation 2257A (I wrote about it last year here and here), which is supposed to be about combating child pornography but is so vaguely worded that it can also include the work of legitimate artists among its banned works, the penalty is being labeled as a ‘sex offender’ and spending up to five years in the Federal pen.

Given that, can you blame artists for staying very clear not of the where the line actually is, but rather, where they imagine it to be?

I found out recently that this type of censorship extends beyond the visual arts. Earlier this week, while listening to the radio, I heard the Pink Floyd song “Money,” from the great album “Dark Side of the Moon.” One of the lines in the song is

“Money, it’s a hit,
don’t give me that goody good bullshit.”

Well, on this occasion, as on earlier recent occasions, the work “bullshit” was broadcast as “bull___.”

I decided that enough was enough, so I went to the station’s website and wrote this message:

The very next day, I received this reply from the station’s program director:

Dave,

You and me both! Allow me to explain.

We almost never played edited versions of songs in the past. But a couple of years ago, thanks mainly to Janet Jackson's boob, the powers that be in this country decided that a random swear word in a song on a radio station was just too terrible for the general public to hear. They raised the potential fine for such an utterance from $27,500 to over $300,000! Now our company's corporate bigwigs pretty much left us alone on this issue in the old days. Well when it was raised to the current level of $325,000, they decided (and I can't really blame them) that the risk wasn't worth it and we were forced to remove the words or the songs altogether.

We've actually done the edits ourselves to try and keep as much of the original song intact as we can. It sucks. We hate it as much as you do. However, none of us have an extra 300K in our pockets to pay the fine ourselves which is what would happen if we ever did get nailed. My only suggestion would be to write your representatives in Congress and tell them how ridiculous this is. "Who the F*** are you?" is hardly going to bring down our great nation...

I hope that explains it. Thanks for writing and for listening!

Well, I guess that explained it! I answered him with this:

Thank you for your kind response. I appreciate your doing so.

Yes, I can understand why management would not want to chance risking a $325K fine. Like you said, though, the whole idea is really ridiculous. Still, I would rather you not play a great like that if it needs to be butchered for the government's sake.

On that note, things are really getting out of hand in this country. I'm a fine art photographer, and one of my subjects is the fine art nude. Last year, the government instituted a new regulation (a parting shot from the Bush administration) that could have you sent to prison and labeled as a child pornographer/sex offender for failure to maintain identification documents and make them available 20 hours a week for government inspection, even if the youngest person you photograph is 60 years old!

Hopefully, one day, people in this country will grow up instead of acting childishly - and forcing everybody else to act the same way.

Have a good day.

His response, then, was:

Wow! That's just ridiculous. I had no idea. Kind of goes with the places that proof everybody for alcohol, even if they are bald or grey and wrinkled and there with their grandkids!

We did debate long and hard about whether or not to play the edits and it wasn't a decision we made lightly. Ultimately we felt that everyone knows what goes in those places anyway so your mind almost "fills in the blank". If the Mona Lisa had a smudge in the corner we'd still want to look at it!

Thanks again for your input and here's hoping we can all get over ourselves in this country! Take care.

So there you go. Our tax dollars at work, protecting the foundations of our great American society by prohibiting random swear words on the radio. What makes it all the more ridiculous is that you can simply go to cable TV (and satellite radio?) to hear all of the foul language (and see all the nudity) you want.

The photo at the top, by the way, was something I shot at the Toshogu Shrine in Nikko, Japan, in 2005. It’s the famous carving of the three monkeys in the “Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” poses. I guess you can figure out why I chose to post it today.