[Live Model]

Another Day Another Girl

Back in the mid-1990’s during my erstwhile would-be artists days, I avidly sought models to sit for live drawing sessions all the time. It was a good way to attempt to remain creative while at the same times socializing with the abundant natural resources in the beach communities where I lived filled with fun, attractive, permissive females.

This photo is from a 35mm black and white, what looks like probably 400 speed T-Max, colorized. The woman I’d met recently and invited over to my apartment on Hornblend Street in Pacific Beach and asked her to get naked, as I would, which she did, and set up my wide angle with the tripod to take a pic over my shoulder. It was 1994 or thereabouts, possibly 1993, and this was the height of technology for me: manual focus with my Nikon FM2 and a Tamron analog lens. I hadn’t yet started Reviewer Magazine, that was yet a couple of years away. But I knew I wanted an outlet that provided me with more creative freedom than the publishing venues available at the time.

There were so many willing girls around at that time it actually got boring. I’d see a girl I liked in a store or a nightclub and invite them over, ask them to undress for me and they would. I could have started a porn business if I had the predisposition but my temperament was always about art and beauty and not actually capturing hardcore imagery even when the girl was inclined. Had I been in Los Angeles and associating with a different crowd and seen all the money the adult cottage-industry participants were making up there in the San Fernando Valley perhaps my direction would have shifted.

Here’s the original version: