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. 

In a particularly intimate part of the shoot Jed and Rainey took turns cutting her hair.

Jed is my partner of many years and Rainey is a longtime friend and muse. Both have a natural ferocity and spirited beauty that kept playing itself out in my imaginations, so I bought some sheer black fabric for them to play with and got them out to Rozel. This shoot delivered on the promise of Jed and Rainey working together as they danced and played their way across the dry crusty lake bed.

 

The waters of the Great Salt Lake are rapidly disappearing forever so I'm glad I've done all the work there that I wanted to do. There is a strange sadness to the area now with the salty waters nowhere in sight. If you hike out far enough you'll find the water but we didn't need to as the wooden pilings and vast open horizon of the dessicated lake bed gave us all of the environmental beauty we could ever hope for. An old rusted iron bouy has always been a favorite go-to for pictures.

A couple of tourists from Europe wandered by as we were ending our shoot so I took the opporrtunity to have one of them take a picture of us. Mission completed - a somewhat sentimental ending to an extraordinary 12 year journey in and around the Great Salt Lake. 

 

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. 

Cooler Pallets

Most of my nudes for many years now have tended towards the warmer tones, which lend themselves to our skin tones. As many marketing studies have shown most of us respond more strongly to warmer tones than cooler ones. For awhile now though I've been experimenting with cooler pallets and find that they're working for me in ways I wouldn't have expected. To wit, here are a couple of recent works that illustrate what that's all about. Oh, and the watermark is something I've avoided doing since I started sharing images online but my images are constantly being stolen and re-appropriated by people who don't care about copyright law. Watermarks aren't foolproof but they do slow down the amateurs a little. 

 

Nudity

I've been taking pictures of nude men and women for about 35 years and even though I've done a lot of different kinds of photography the nudes are at the core of my work. There is nothing to defend - this is what I love and this is what I do. Centuries of artists before me have done the same and most of the time their work feeds me and inspires me. A handful of contemporary photographers and artists do nudes that are thrilling to me and I love that the internet has made it possible to see their work on a daily basis. And then there are the fascinating and beautiful people who have worked nude for me; wow do I have reverence and gratitude for them because there would be no artwork without them. It's a delicious minestrone of bodies, personalities, locations and imagery. I'm a very lucky guy.

Resting On a Bed of Salt

John Cottrell photographed at Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Copyrighted Image - All Rights Reserved