Tom Clark Photography

Mysteries Of The Big Salty Lake - Jed and Rainey

In 2009 I began crafting a series of images in and around The Great Salt Lake in Utah. After dozens of shoots and countless images later the collection called 'Mysteries Of The Big Salty Lake' found its natural ending with Rainey and Jed providing the wild and unfettered beauty that I'd long been hoping for. Mysteries Of The Big Salty Lake is now complete.

We traveled to the north end of the lake to Rozel Point, a stone's throw from Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. It's a place of harsh magic where oil oozes from the earth, the water has 27% salinity and the wooden remnants of long ago oil rigs still haunt the landscape. It's crazy dry up there and the wind can whip fiercely while storms move in quickly across the lake from the desert. V shaped formations of brown pelicans fly effortlessly overhead from their home on Gunnison Island while the occasional snake slithers underfoot. For the past 12 years it's been my favorite place on the lake to shoot. Journeying there with my models is a ritual I've loved and will certainly miss. It feels good to have said goodbye with Rainey and Jed providing so much magic to the collection.

 

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There's a lot to share about this shoot and I'll do that in the next few weeks. The selection and editing of images is a process that takes a lot of time when models like Rainey and Jed have delivered one astonishing moment after another.

 

All of the images on this page, on this post and on this blog are Copyrighted by Tom Clark and may not be used in any form, digital or otherwise, without specific written permission. 

Aurelia Reneè

It's possible that there's been a child more photographed than my daughter Auri, but I'd have to see it to believe it. She was a little over a year old when I first decided to become a photographer and by the time she was two she'd become a full-time muse for my work; sitting patiently for endless photo sessions while allowing me to play with her hair, her clothes and the lighting that fell around her.

 

Even at a very young age Auri had a presence about her that was self-assured and serene and it made taking pictures of her a wonderful experience. As she grew older and watched my clients during photo sessions, she became even more skilled at disassociating herself from the camera and going off into her own quiet little world where we would sometimes work together for several hours. I could always tell when she was tired of the process though and we didn't pushed beyond her threshold. There was no need to really - we were taking pictures for fun.

 

Antonio di Falco

 

Antonio di Falco and I met in the summer of 1983 around the time that both of us moved to Hollywood to pursue our dreams of becoming photographers. I had taken a job in a 1 Hour Photo Lab at the Farmer’s Market at 3rd and Fairfax and it was there that I met Antonio who walked in one day and asked a photography related question. It took me all of about ten seconds to realize he was Italian. “Sei Italiano?” Are you Italian? He laughed and for the next ten years there was rarely a word of English spoken between us because, well, I grew up in Rome and my Italian is native. Over the years my experience has always been that when speaking to Italians, no matter how good their English, we always seem to default to Italian. When we met that summer I had just returned from Rome where I was studying music and teaching piano lessons so I was in my default, full-blown Italian everything.

 

 

Antonio was so completely Italian through and through that he even carried his own little bottle of Italian olive oil with him when we went out to eat. He knew as I did that we’d never get decent olive oil in a restaurant we could afford to eat at. While other friends laughed at the perceived snobbery, I completely got it. 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

For seven years I lived in Backbay, a neighborhood of Newport Beach that's well known to most people who live around there. I lived alone in a comfortable two bedroom apartment across the street from the bay where the ocean breezes blew up from the bay and into my bedroom window and then out through the living room window; my reality every day of the year. It was there that I enjoyed a level of contentment and independence that I'd never known before. I think part of the happiness and lightness of that period was being so alone that there was no one to weigh in on anything I wanted to do. I did what I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it. There was a simplicity to it even though there was always a lot of loneliness lurking in the periphery. The simplicity of doing whatever I wanted to do came with a new sense of responsibility though; if I didn't take the trash out it didn't get taken out. If I didn't pay the utility bills they didn't get paid and trouble followed. 

 

Jed

 

Jed and I met on Earth Day, April 22nd of 2014. I'd been working for a short time at a local nursery when Jed walked in and asked for some tomato plants for a garden he was planting. A few weeks earlier I'd met someone at a party who looked a lot like him so when I saw him I assumed it was the same guy. "Aren't you the guy I met at so and so's party a few weeks ago?" Worst pickup line ever except that I wasn't trying to pick him up. He answered that he didn't think he was who I thought he was and we continued talking about tomatoes.

At some point in the conversation I learned that Jed was a fire dancer and I had recently photographed a fire dancer so I was interested in doing more work along those lines. We chatted for awhile and then decided to get together the next evening for dinner so that we could pursue the conversation and make some plans for a shoot. We had dinner and then headed back to my place where we spent most of the rest of the night talking and tripping. There was a moment of awkwardness when I realized that it was way late and I needed to get some sleep but really really really didn't want to just kick him out. So I asked him if he wanted to stay. He did and we've been inseperable ever since.

Sundays in Laguna

For seven years I lived and worked in a quiet little neighborhood in the Backbay area of Newport Beach called Santa Ana Heights. Though I call the area a quiet little neighborhood it lies directly under the flight path of the Orange County Airport. Not a problem for me though since every time a jet took off I imagined myself in it and on my way to Italy, my childhood home. It was a beautiful way to turn the noise of a jet engine into a promising fantasy that more than a few times became my reality. Perhaps one of the best parts of living in Santa Ana Heights was the fact that it took me 13 minutes to get to Laguna Beach, the legendary beach town that to this day remains one of my favorite places on earth. I have loved Laguna since I first discovered it in early 1983 and Jed and I are currently in the planning phase of making it our permanent home.

All of that is to introduce you to a series of letters that I wrote to friends about my adventures in Laguna on Sunday mornings. I never intended it to be a thing but on its own it became one. I created the domain SundaysInLaguna.com and began to gather the essays and stories into one place. As we contemplate our new life there I’m certain that these essays will likely begin again with an updated perspective on a Southern California beach town that has seen a fascinating and unstoppable evolution over the past many decades. In that light I would like to begin where my original essays left off and share with you my thoughts on what it means to be a part of that evolution. This was written on Super Bowl Sunday 2016  

I Read Your Letter...

Cabin in the Mountains

One of the many people that I photographed for Playgirl magazine is Dirk Shafer, pictured here in a cabin in the San Bernardino Mtns east of Los Angeles. It was our first shoot of many and was quite successful in that it eventually contributed to Dirk being named one of Playgirl's 'Man of the Year.' The editors of the magazine kept telling me to make the work more raunchy but I wasn't much good at raunchy so I stuck to doing what I knew how to do best. One month they were ok with erections and the next month they weren't. It was always difficult dealing with them for a host of reasons, so I finally stopped shooting for them. Over the years though I crafted a lot of fun images of both men and women for Playgirl and learned a lot about working with nude models in the process. This was shot on 35mm transparency film and scanned from the original slide. 

 

Once Were Lovers

A long time ago in a very far away place called Hollywood I photographed two beautiful young women together. They had once been lovers but at the time of the shoot were just really close friends who were willing to work with me for a few hours in the studio. I love this earlier work because of its simplicity and because of my innocence at the time. I worked only with film of course and did most of my own darkroom work. I started doing nudes about 35 years ago and have never stopped. It's what I love, it's what I do and I'm grateful for the beautiful and interesting people who've been willing to get nude for my cameras. 

 

Demeter and the Harvest

Eight of my friends helping me celebrate the harvest as per the ancient traditions when women got together and had fun while harvesting the season's bounty. They are Heather, Auri, Alison, Erika, Melissa, Michele, Deb and JJ. Thank you muses, you light my fires...

 

Jedi

I've been sharing a lot of pictures of my partner Jed lately. We met on Earth Day 2014 and have been inseparable since. In that time we've done a lot of work together. He was modeling before we met and we just kicked it up a few notches with images and videos that would thrill me even if we weren't together. I'm playing catch-up here with images that I feel have an important place in my collections. With that said, here's one from last year in the Sierras where we spent a few weeks camping, playing and taking tons of pictures.