Dear Friend,
Welcome to my new Pan's Peony Photo Journal!
If you're reading this you've subscribed to my new site and I'm so excited that you're here! I've been working hard to bring you a new experience for PP and thrilled to finally share months of hard work.
To celebrate the transition, today’s post will be a look back at some of my previous work and include photographs I was not able to include before on Patreon.
Paris Portfolio Pt 1
I am fortunate to have a friend whose apartment in Paris is empty often and occasionally, he allows me to stay. Being American, I don't know as many people in Paris and the apartment turns into a studio, a meeting place, a Giovanni's Room where I can host, create, and explore new photographic ideas. When I was there in the fall of 2024, I created a series of pastel drawings inspired by Cy Twombly's Fifty Days at Illium Series.
Admittedly, I find Cy Twombly's "intellectualism: a bit difficult to sort through, but I love his paintings. They are a perfect mix of sophisticated but loose, minimal and yet still layered and rich. I am not a painter but I needed to add something to the scenes I was curating in this apartment that felt etheral but wasn't too expensive ... set design in photography is so important but I'd spent all my money on airfare so there was no budget for anything except some paper and pastels. I was lucky to be able to afford film at the time (a luxury I currently cannot afford).
The point I wanted to quickly make here, however, is that I love how mirrors are used in small apartments to make a space feel bigger. In a painting, or drawing, you can add extra lines or colors to open up visual space, but in photography, I find a mirror to be an extremely useful tool. They place the viewer in a confounding position. Looking at the photo I find myself wondering, "am I being photographed?" The camera becomes a character in the photograph, which, I think, is important. It represents an interloping eye, (or is it yours, viewer?) that interrupts an otherwise intimate scene.
Thank you for reading !
PARIS PORTFOLIO Pt 2
This week I am sharing more photographs of Bruno from a shoot I did in Paris in 2024. For those of you who were subscribed last week, you know that Bruno has a truly glorious dick. I will be sharing more photographs of it in the next few weeks but for now, I wanted to focus on these sweet photographs from earlier in the afternoon to give you a sense of how a shoot with me is done. I like to ease into things, make sure that the model is comfortable before everyone is undressed. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about this series, my Paris Portfolio, and my plans to expand it.
Soon, I am happy to say, I will be traveling to Paris again to work on this series. I have always been inspired by 19th century portraitists like Courbet or Ingres and being in Paris I found a lot of inspiration from the city. It's beautiful and yet feels a bit old, like it's crumbling. I find taking photographs there a bit more free. Perhaps, that's because I'm not French, so not beholden to the complex social codes that French people live by.
Being there is different than being the United States. In France, older things have value. In America, newer things do. Both have their charm and their drawbacks. France can be romantic and beautiful, but the culture can also feel sedentary, like it's strangled by tradition. The USA can seem soulless or materialistic, but the optimism and emphasis on new ideas can be energizing. I find the mix to be appealing. There's a middle ground between reverence for history and progressive thought that I've always found comforting. Or, at least that's something I strive to produce in my pictures.
I always want my pictures to feel effortless, like I just happened to have a camera with me on a languid Sunday afternoon. What was fun about this shoot is that Bruno became cock became erect as soon as I took my clothes off....
and it didn't go down until after the shoot.
Have a great week !
x
Matthew
