A few weeks ago Complex Magazine approached me about shooting some art parties or art openings for their website.  They want to expand some of their web coverage so they asked if I could bring them a few galleries every month this Summer.  Other than being glad for the work, I am happy to do it because it gives me a reason to shoot something other than the same old dance parties and since I am working on a show of my own, hopefully it will make for good networking.

For my first event I decided to stick close to home a little bit in shooting my friend Ellen Stagg’s show at Fuse Gallery called Melting Flesh. I have covered a bunch of Ellen’s work and I am sure you know by now that I am a big fan.  Her and I shoot a lot of the same naked people, only she is actually pretty good at what she does.  She runs her own all nude site called Stagg Street, but she also does more commercial work.  One of the reason I like Ellen’s work is because it is very straight forward and simple.  I am not really a big fan of overly photoshopped or weirdly manipulated artsy photography so when I heard Ellen was going to be showing her Holga work I was a bit nervous.

For those who haven’t yet bought the $70 Holga kit at Urban Outfitters, Holga is a plastic camera that used to cost about $12 and takes horrible pictures that people like to call art.  The lens is made of plastic so things get distorted and the cameras have all sorts of light leaks and it takes square medium format pictures so you get weird effects every time and you can feel super pretentious about using 120 film. I have seen some good Holga work but most of it is crap, so like I said, when I heard Ellen was showing her Holga stuff I was a bit worried.

Good photographers can do a lot with any camera and Ellen is a good photographer.  She picked up a Holga for a reason. She used it as another tool to express the sexuality that is in most of her work and she did it well. Very well.  Ellen took advantage of the manual winder on the Holga to shoot halfway double exposed nudes that took up almost the entire roll of film. The warped lens and light leaks and all the weirdness of the camera perfectly lent themselves to creating melty moving images blurring the nude form and creating a wet-dreamlike experience. All of the images were strong but there were more than a half dozen images that I was completely captivated by.

The opening itself was a lot of fun and I got to talk to a lot of photographers and models who came out to support Ellen. I got to meet photographer Bob Coulter for the first time and I got to bug Penthouse Pets Ryan Keely, Justine Jolie and Darenzia bout finally shooting with me. The show was packed most of the night and when I left the after party at Lit was just getting started with T&B’s The Capitan spinning the newest disco record or whatever the kids are listening to these days. It was a very sucessfull opening and I am sure Ellen sold a ton of arts.

You should make the effort check out Ellen’s show sometime this month at Fuse Gallery. It is located in the back of Lit Lounge on 2nd Ave between 5th and 6th Streets. The Gallery is open Wednesday – Saturday from 3 to 8pm. And check out more of Ellen’s less ethereal nudes at Stagg Street .

So here is the gallery of photos on Complex and then you can click here to see those shots plus a number of other outtakes on my site from Ellen’s Melting Flesh art show at Fuse Gallery.  The pictures are all safe for work, but some of the art in the background is a little racy. You have been warned.

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