From June 30, to July 6, 1996, I attended Greg Gorman’s class at the Santa Fe Workshops. It was designed to allow the students to explore new ways of working creatively with nude figure in wilderness settings. For two days before the class began I did private shoots with models I had met in Santa Fe the year before. An interesting insight came out of one of those shoots.

I am exploring a theory about how to work better with particular models in an outdoors setting. I ask myself this question: “If she was a minor goddess (as in the pantheon of Greek spirits), what place would she inhabit: a forest, by a stream, a cave, in the rocks, in old ruins, in a house? What I am looking for is a place where the model is really at home in the natural environment. When I did the shoot with Helena at a waterfall she was totally at ease in that venue: she really owned the place where we were shooting. At the time I knew that she was totally at ease in that place; but it was later that I came to an understanding of the possible why of it. On that day, that venue was for Helena a “sacred place” where she felt really grounded.

I have shot outdoors in Santa Fe for three years now and I have noticed that some models work well outdoors in one place and not another. I surmise that the model-place connection is like a Meyer-Briggs Personality Inventory thing; that just as our personality is one way or another, so also our spirit resonates better in one place than another. James Redfield, in The Celestine Vision (1997), talks of Sacred Sites were we are especially at ease. My own personal experience suggests that there is something to the notion. I have always known that good photography is a collaborative effort. I probably need to let my models tell me even more about where they envisage themselves being photographed, then let them guide me to their natural places and see what happens.

These as some of the figure images I recorded with model Helena at a small waterfall pool on Embudo Creek east of Dixon, NM (“the Land of Enchantment”). Helena had modeled before, but this was her first nude-figure shoot.