#4 Tommy the Tattoo Artist

Many thanks to Tommy who accepted this project having no clue what he was getting into…
One thing I have learned: if you do NOT have a plan nothing can go according to your plan..
My instructions were very simple..
“Sit in the window and do something”
“what?”
“I dunno, something related to what you do…to your story of being a tattoo artist, & Don’t forget to get me my story soon so I am not behind on this project”
“ok what do you want me to do again?”
“I don’t care, anything!”

Tommy decides this is a good time to inventory his old inks and toss those that are dried out an those that are past expiration or too old or whatever…
See that ink bottle that is bright green in the background?
That one was NOT dried out in fact it made a huge mess all over everything including his jeans and my light reflector.

So the shoot moves to another window next to the shower where Tommy attempts to scrub off all the green ink.

We go to the third window of the day and find I let Tommy perform more mundane tasks like texting friends a quick 1 hour shoot took over 2 hours of clean up it was nap time…

Tommy's version of his story is this...

"The more i am in front of the camera the more respect i have for nude models..
I am so much more comfortable being the man behind the lens.. never being seen.. showing what i want my viewer to see in stead of being center stage.

Most of the time im up for anything so when M. Carle asked me to be part of her project of course i agreed! Although i have no idea how to pose.. or to model.. i tried my best to forget that i was being photographed and the fact that i felt a little self conscious..

At first i felt awkward and lame.. but as soon as i started tripping over myself, playing with needles, and spilling ink all over i forgot all about being photographed! It became a panicked race to clean the ink up off my clothes, roommates belongings and carpet.. haha.. so fun.

All the time M. Carle was laughing at my feeble attempt at washing this tattoo ink off of myself and everything else!

All in all it was a fun shoot and its always a pleasure hanging out with M. Carle! "

#3 Theda in New Jersey

Since I started shooting nudes in windows before I was having the subjects tell their stories.
Not every subject has a story that they wished to submit in the first few shoots.
But here is the story of how this shoot went down as told by me your host.
Theda is a very well known very accomplished art nude model in NY,

I had traveled to NY to visit and wanted to shoot her in a window in the huge studio where I was staying at.Shooting in these old windows with rotting sills and rusted iron bars proved to be a bit of a challenge.

In the last image I pointed to the window and asked to climb on up…
She looked at me & with caustic wit let me know that art models do not just fly into window sills…
I was not about to be upstaged so I climbed into the window myself with no aid…
I then hopped down and found a ladder for her to use to ascend into her window.

#2 Danny a Photographer in London

Photography is the ultimate voyeur - even with posed portraiture, the camera is still trying to look inside your soul. It strips people bare, takes them out of time to create a frozen time capsule that will endure, unchanging, for probably longer than the lifetime of the subject.

As such, the job of a photographer strips away the ephemera surrounding a person and so the nude window project is, to me, a metaphor of the profession. Everything unnecessary to my line of work has been stripped away, literally, to leave just me, my camera and a window of opportunity.

Which, suitably, is exactly what a photograph wants to be, an empathic window into someone else's world.