A Message to KSM (Ken) ... See the link to his blog in the previous entry (below):

Ken –

I spent WAY more time reading your blog than I imagined I would … sucked in, as it were. It’s probably the most interesting and engaging piece of off the cuff writing I’ve encountered in a while.

I tend to jump in on one side of an issue or another, more for the sake of using the discussion as a means to hang my thoughts in the air so I can see what I’m really thinking than I do to score wins or losses. I’ve found the environmental nude discussion has been a great help to me in arm wrestling my way through the competing ideas.

I thought the idea of discussing reality versus perception was interesting – but I think a more visceral exchange might be an exploration of what draws photographers and models to this particular area of the arts – and what is the relationship between these photographers and these models. What drives these people to play their respective roles – freezing their asses off in a Sub-Arctic winter to get a picture of a naked person dry humping a snow bank?

As a parenthetical aside and just for the sake of argument, I’d would argue that perceived reality is the only reality and leave it at that. (Someone once accused me of being the intellectual equivalent of a drive by shooter. I think they probably mean something on the order of, “deadly at the initial encounter but without much follow-up after the fact.”)

Reading your stuff did two things for me, both good in my estimation – ok, maybe more than two things. First, they gave me the sense that I should pass on the coffee this morning and move straight on to the bourbon without benefit of side trips or stops along the way. Secondly and far more importantly, the narrative gave a context to your work that I’d not had previously. The blog was for me the Rosette Stone that I needed to find my way into your visual vocabulary. Where the images were before a series of individual hieroglyphs related more by style than anything else, I now have solid clues to the underlying drift of the “words” and “sentences” and “chapters” of the images – or at very least some clues on how to get there.

Your stuff is WAY more interesting after a couple of peeks inside your head.

I figured E-mail would be best for a personal aisde. Hope you don't mind me cluttering up your mailbox.

Regards,
J