Today’s Post by Joe Farace
A man is a combination of all the interesting women that he’s known.—?
Flash back to the late seventies: My friend Audrey spoke those words to me one sunny day while we were sitting on a bench in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon Place, with the first monument in the country to honor George Washington looming in the background. I don’t know if that quote was something that she intuited on her own—Audrey was a wonderfully intuitive person—or whether it was made by someone else, although I’ve never been able to track it down.
In the years since then, I’ve found her statement to be prescient. I found it true of the influence my wife Mary has had on my life. I like to think her positive influence on me has made me a better person for having spent 40 years together. I said it before but will say it again—and Mary will never read this— I only hope to live long enough to become the kind of person she is.
As a photographer I have a debt of gratitude to share with many people, especially the women who have posed for me over the year. During the early 1980’s I rekindled my interest in glamour photographer when discovering (or maybe rediscovering) the work of Peter Gowland* when finding some of his books in a store on Denver’s Sixth Avenue. That experience was enhanced by my friendship with the late Dave Hall but especially my photographic relationship with a singularly amazing model and incredible human being who called herself “Dawn of the Rockies.” In real life her name was Dawn Clifford and she helped shape me into the glamour photographer that I am and am working on becoming.
I started photographing Dawn during the end of the (original) film era, And all through the time we worked together, she inspired me to be a better photographer. She once told me that occasionally when photographing her I would sometimes spontaneously exclaim,”I can’t stand it.” She later explained that when I said that she know I had just captured a great portrait of her.
I made the featured available light portrait of Dawn in the living room of her home with one of my original Contax film cameras. She posed for me when I barely knew how to handle portrait lighting. At that time, I was a big fan of “flat boring” lighting because it was easy to do and I hated to think about approaching portrait lighting the way masters such as Joe Zeltsman or Don “Big Daddy” Blair were showing all the photographers who were paying attention. I wasn’t.
When I was shooting with a soft focus lens and making too many frames shooting like a maniac instead of taking the time to look at each of the images I was making, Dawn hung in there with me. And when I was trying to figure it all out and through all of my stupid mistakes, she never failed to offer a smile and words of encouragement. In doing so she taught me the one thing I carry with me today—have fun with photography. More than once when I had a shoot scheduled with her but wasn’t in a good mood, my wife would tell me, “don’t worry Dawn will cheer you up.” And time after time she did just that
Thank you, Dawn. I feel that I still have a lot to learn about portrait and glamour photography but I would not have made it this far without your help and encouragement.
*My first book about glamour photography—Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography—is dedicated to Alice and Peter Gowland, with fond remembrances. I got to know Mr. Gowland late in his life and am sorry I did not get to meet him earlier in both our lives. Peter Gowland was both a technical genius and creative photographer who leaves behind a body of work that few working in this genre could ever hope to compete with. But his influence and that of Ms. Clifford turned me from the kind of journeyman photographer I was when I moved to Colorado in 1981 into someone that, on my best days, might actually act like I know what I’m doing.