Dear Patron,
Today I am sharing pictures of Peter and Part 2 my essay from my Berlin Archive. I would also like to let you know that I've added prints for sale on my site! They are the highest quality archival pigment prints, printed on Hahnumuhle paper which has been used by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, among many others, and been in use since 1548. It's really the best paper available for photo prints.
As of now, I have single square prints available in two sizes, 6x6" and 12x12", as well as triptychs available in 3 sizes, 4x6" 5x7" and 8x10" !
Berlin Archive Pt 2...
By 2013, I was so taken with the concept of BERLIN I was spending every summer there, first doing a photography residency in 2011, then winning a grant in 2012 to work on a project, and again in 2013 and 2015. These pictures of Peter, made in the summer of 2013. The first summer I really felt like I was starting to “make it” as an artist.
Earlier that Spring, I had been accepted to Columbia University School of the Arts. At the time, I thought this was a major achievement and maybe it was – only 2% of applicants were accepted that year. Looking back, it’s hard for me to understand how anyone thought it was a good idea to loan a 23 year-old kid $100,000 to acquire, what feels to me today, like the Birkin Bag of educational degrees – an MFA.
But I didn’t care about any of that in the summer of 2013. That summer I was working on a project that would later be titled Complicit, a series of photographs of older men in various modes of undress. I don’t know where the idea came from, at the time, adult men made me uncomfortable. But there was something comforting about these older gay guys. Most of them were kind and accommodating. In truth, I think I just wanted to do something that would make me stand out on my grad school application.
The project quickly took over my life. I spent every waking minute thinking about it. Over the years, many would mislabel me a gerontophile, but I didn’t care. That was the edge. It was the place where a quiet, shy boy from the suburbs of Rhode Island could masquerade as someone interesting, a real artist.
My whole personality became so enmeshed in these photographs that once, at a party back in NY, a friend of a friend I didn’t know very well except to say that she was heterosexual and the kind of uptight girl that goes to burning-man once or twice to prove she has a personality, asked me about my project. It was the only thing she knew about me, that I photographed older men.
“Are you into older men?” she asked, somewhat genuinely.
This question came up a lot. I didn’t always but sometimes I did, and why not? Some of the men I photographed, in Berlin especially, had the biggest dicks I had ever seen, up to that point. I was 23, 24 and 25, and at the end of shoot it always felt a shame to waste the opportunity.
But when that friend-of-a-friend and I finally came to the point of the question she was really asking, if I was into having sex with older men, I coldly asked, “would you be into fucking your father.”
She giggled, flushed red and said, “haha no,” embarrassed she had offended me.Years later, when I saw on instagram that she’d married someone ten years her senior, I realized why she had been so curious and awkward.
That's all for this week,
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See you on Wednesday,
x
Matthew
