Photography for me started in high school. I was taking an advanced art class for college credit. I could draw and paint and whatnot, but sometimes with drawing I found I just didn't have the patience for it. One day, I took it upon myself to talk one of my peers into posing nude so that I could do some drawings of her. That was the first time I shot a nude. I guess you could say my very first nude was illegal then, since we were in high school and both of us were underage. We don't go around promoting that too much.
When I went to college at Columbus State University, they had a photography course, and I'd already been bitten by the bug, so I just took everything I could, and learned all the technical aspects of it. The first body paint I ever did anything with, I did in college. And the girl I did it with over time grew to become one of my best friends, if not my best friend. I painted a Van Gogh's "Starry Night" across her chest.
Why nudes? Well, as it progressed, living in Southern Georgia, which is part of the Bible Belt, it was just a way to be unique. I mean, it's not difficult to be unique, but I guess I'm just the kind of person that gets a kick outta being unique and pissing people off! It makes people uncomfortable, and that makes me smile. Ninety per cent of the country would agree that what I do is alright, but the remaining 10 per cent of the ones I do it for. And they seem to have a hard time with it. I get a kick out of it.
Some people are so uncomfortable with the nude body in the south. Not only are people uncomfortable with posing nude themselves, they are just uncomfortable with the body in general. I guess over the years, it's gotten better and people are less conservative, but there are a lot of people that don't like what I do.
I like shadows and I like the way the light falls in black and white - I read a quote somewhere, that said the difference between fine art and porn is the lighting. I agree. You take one picture and light it in one way and it's gorgeous and appreciated for what it is; if you light it a different way people tend to gasp at it, but the subject is the same. I've seen that quite a bit as I've experimented with color and no color - People, especially traditionalists, tend to linger toward black and white. Especially in erotic photography. When you add color to something, people tend to want to associate that with porn. I haven't quite figured that one out yet.
But with color, there's not a lot to it. It's straightforward. It shows what's there. Black and white can open up a photograph to reveal a bit about the person in the image. You know, not only in the physical realm, but it can reveal all sorts of idiosyncrasies about the body that you didn't know were there. You can have a nice color photograph. But you can't hide behind a good black and white photograph, and it humbles the model too.
She, or he, doesn't know all there is to know about themselves, because who does? A lot of people are clueless about their body. Even high end fashion models are clueless about their body because they haven't seen a real photograph. They've only seen high fashion, glamour, touched up, spruced up, plastic, fake versions of their photographs. People in general don't often see a good photograph of themselves that shows them for who they are. Especially professional models - when it's black and white and artsy and she's being posed in abstract, revealing ways, and she's trying hard not to do the poses she's been trained to do, it kind of brings her down a level and it's a different mindset. It brings them down a notch in terms of how they perceive themselves and brings them up a notch in how they can perceive themselves.
There's really no answer to why I mainly photograph women. I've actually got a couple guys wanting to shoot. But especially in the south, if you approach a guy and ask him to pose nude, his first reaction is to do a double take because he's not sure exactly how to take that. (Laughs)
As for my wife, we started out with it being known that this is what I do. She's always been cool with it. Most of the photographs hanging in our home have been picked out by her. She's usually home during the shoots and she's seen me working. She helps me with ideas and the models take to her as well. We make a great team. Jealousy? Human nature, I guess, but she's great.
I try to stay away from sensationalism. I don't overdo it. But that's just because I'm a repressed Bible Belt person. (Laughs) Nature doesn't inspire me as much as nudes do because I really don't get to control the environment like I want to. You know, I go outside and take a picture, and well, that's the way it was. But if I have someone in front of me, I'm creating. I don't create the body, but I'm manipulating and telling the body how I want it to move. It's kind of like the way I've never been inspired by Andy Warhol's Campbell's cans or Coke cans-Modern art movement aside, that was already there, and all he did was show it to us.
The part of the body that reveals the soul is the eyes, but any specific body part that opens up a part of the person can reveal the soul. You can take a picture of someone and they're pristine and well-built, but you look closer and one picture focuses on a scar and you get a story behind that-Everyone has a scar, somewhere. I've never met anyone who didn't. Scars are usually, second to the eyes, the next open door. There will always be a story, whether small or big, that will lead you to the other parts.
I've had shoots fall through, a lot of shoots fall through, simply because of the self-consciousness of the person. I had a woman who had a breast augmentation wanted a photograph and she eventually backed off because she was a little nervous, and that's fine.
I've been wanting to do a series of amputees, but where I live kind of limits me to what I can and can't shoot. We're the third largest city in the state (I think) and we're still kind of remote. Most of the people I shoot are from Atlanta, Georgia, which is a two hour drive. They take a two hour haul, just to come and do a shoot with me. Here, pickings are slim as far as the mindset is concerned. There are gorgeous people, men and women, in this city, and there are people with the type of scars or amputees or whatever that I'd like to photograph, but the mindset is more conservative. It's amazing that it's so different just two hours north of here. I guess that's why I get the "quote" shock and awe that I do.
My website www.fleshandcolor.com [1] has a disclaimer on it because in this day and age, you can't be too safe with the government. I just want to make sure I have all areas covered. The fact is that authorities leap before they think. If they go to somebody's website, a guy or girl could be 25 years old, but if they look like they're 12, then folks will react. I've seen that happen in various regions. It was all cleared after the fact, but all the artists have already been burned into people's minds as people who take underage pictures. The disclaimer is just something that has to be there because of the paid portion of the site and because people are so jumpy down here about nudity.
I do have an ability for talking people out of their clothes I guess. (Laughs) You have to be shooting photographs for the right reasons. If your reason to shoot photographs is just to have a nude person in front of you so you can get your rocks off, then you're going to approach it the wrong way. If you're doing because you want to create something that's more than just what you see standing there, and what people expect to see when they talk about you, then you'll approach it another way. It's just a matter of having a bit of confidence in asking people to pose. In the worst case scenario, they say no, and in the very worst case scenario, they get up in and slap you. But that's never happened. My rejections are one of three: No, I don't feel comfortable; No, it's pornographic; Or no, not from the person I'm asking, but from their spouse.
If you just go up to somebody and say, "Hey, I'm a photographer; I wanna get you naked," well, that's going to get a bad reaction. So, I find if you give them your name, tell them what you do, how you go about it, what you'd like to do, give them your card, and show them your work - then they're more receptive. You either get a phone call back or you don't. Essentially, you just leave it up to them and don't rush them.
People are right to be skeptical. There's a phrase called GWC, and it means guy or gal with camera-That's what you see now a lot with the invention of digital. A guy or a girl picks up a new digital camera as a toy and instantly say they're a photographer. And they shoot whatever, it shows they haven't really been trained and they're letting the camera do all the work.
Digital is taking over and that doesn't bother me at all. Digital is still in the early stage, and hardcore traditionalists are still really anti-digital and that that's just the way it is. When we went from realism to impressionism, the realists had a real hard time accepting it. You've got the hardcore film photographers who will never stop shooting film until film stops being produced, and they think a digital photographer is just a joke, and they don't want you to be able to do what they do in the studio.
But that's just the way the world's going. Digital has already proven to produce a print equal to or greater than a film print. I think it's just a matter of people being set in their ways and not able to admit defeat. But I do agree that any photographer should know how to process traditional film before they start shooting digital because when you know that, you appreciate the digital and take your work to a new realm.
It's just new and people don't want to take hold of it. But they're going to be forced to in the next few years.
I've never had anyone try to stop what I'm doing. I get a random e-mail from time to time. I got most of my negative reactions in college, because I was showing my work publicly a lot more in college and we were getting critiques. You could see the discomfort or disapproval on people's faces. And that was great to me, because it just told me I was on the right track.
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To view more work by Dewayne Flowers, go to:
www.fleshandcolor.com [2]
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