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exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
ExhibitPhotoPDX
@exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
560 followers 170 following 260 posts
A Federally-registered pirate with a long history of a good time. Also fairly obsessed with back roads, out-of-the-way places and finding out who YOU want to be today. Will claim to have driven almost every major dirt road in the PNW and beyond.
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exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
It's been a little bit since this trip but every Christmas I chuckle and smile at the memory. More in the alt-text.
#roadtrip #vacation #deathvalley #nudeart #artmodel
The first challenge was leaving. It was three days before Christmas Eve and cold in Oregon. I was up early for coffee and firing up the 4WD to go get studded tires for the trip. There was a sharp backfire as I turned the engine over and I didn't think too much of it as the truck had been sitting for a bit since its summer camping duties. Then I saw steam coming up on the window. Popping the hood I ran around and opened the engine compartment and stared at absolutely nothing out of place for a long moment. Then I dropped the hood and stared at the smoke pouring up the INSIDE of the glass. Jumping back inside. Where the fuck? I yanked the glove box and it came right out and goddamn there were flames. Fire. Real live fire in my truck. I grabbed a rag and began batting at the glove box which just served to cover the back of my hand with burning plastic. I ran for the house, doused my hand and grabbed a pitcher from the sink and threw it into the fire. Not enough water. There was a hose at the side of the house and I used it to douse the entire instrument panel and sprayed it inside the housing until everything seemed to be tamped down. Sat in the truck for fifteen minutes watching it suspiciously. Goddamn. There's a life lesson in there. The airbag light had been on for three or four years and I'd never really paid much attention. It chose that morning, thankfully, to blow the airbag charge sideways through the dash. Could have been worse. With the 4WD out of commission and probably not getting repaired before we hit the holidays, I eventually agreed with myself that the fire was good and truly OUT and drove my 2WD Suburban to get studded tires for the trip. Yes, I'm a two Suburban household -- it's a longer story in itself. Later that day I pulled up in front of Hailey's and she tumbled out the door with a bag and her Black Lab, ready to rock. We were off. We took the hot spring route down through the desert. Our destination was Saline Valley, the less-touristed and more-rugged basin just north of the main Death Valley complex. During a third bottle of red wine some months earlier she had shown me a picture of dramatic rocks and said she wanted to model the hell out of 'em. That seemed like a fine idea. The trip itself was everything amazing. The gorgeous winter scenery of the High Desert as we moved across basin and range in what seemed like slow motion. The tight compact snow squalls against vast blue sky. The occasional deserted ranch with draperies flapping through what used to be windows. Epic. Taking the 2WD into Saline was heavy on my mind, however. I'm much given to driving improbable vehicles into stupid places but I am also aware of limitations. Saline immediately exceeds those limits, or so I thought until we came over the pass to begin our descent into the valley and ran into a group of kids winching their buddy in a Celica around an icy and off-camber corner. Amazing. Hilarious. I felt better about my own decision-making. The next few days featured a surprise cold front that dropped temps into the single digits. The Black Lab turned out to be a reasonably good heater for car camping and we eventually ran into Beatty, NV when we finished the last of the red wine and whiskey, where we had the single greatest night in a bar that I've ever experienced. Another, longer, story for another time. There were other adventures and they, too, are longer stories, culminating in an amazing meal in Carson City with friends unexpectedly met. Funny enough, I remember almost nothing of the trip home from there, although it must have occurred. I have a memory of Hailey curled up asleep in the passenger seat, hair thrown out over my lap. The Black Lab was asleep in the back, fulfilling his mission in life to be a good boy.
December 6, 2025 at 6:07 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
As one does. I didn't know that this would be our last shoot (never say never!) but Hailey "retired" about this point. Still a wonderful roadtrip and dinner partner but I will confess to missing her quirky approach to modeling. She was unique and that is worth a lot!
December 4, 2025 at 8:09 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Twisting the night away. Rumination in the alt-text.
#twist #body #belly #emotion #wintersun #roadtrip #flare #thoughtful #hip #blackandwhite #pdxphotographer #artmodel #mood
If you've read my musings here you'll know that I have a push-pull thought about the "sexiness" of nude art. When I took up the camera a decade ago it was with a mission to find patterns and LOSE people in darkness and light. I'm not immune to the erotic charge of nudity and I've long recognized that my preference in models mirrors my personal preference of what I find attractive. I admire photographers who range through that limitation or even venture into capturing the repulsive (injury or death, for example) but that's just not my thing in the moment. I realized, also quickly, that I was grappling with relationship patterns in my portrayals -- a lot of early work featured women as monsters in the shadows. By the time I really connected those dots, however, I had had enough great conversation and laughter that I was beginning to see women more holistically, sometimes to my own detriment! I enjoy shots that find corners of a body and turn them into something complete or intriguing but a lot of the time I find that I can't (or won't) see past the entirety of a body. I wanted/want a wholeness. Truly this is an amazing journey of therapy - lol! This particular moment, a bit of light and a corner seen through an interior glass door, strikes me as encapsulating the type of "pose" that I find most evocative. Eva was simply in her flow and allowing her emotions to play across her body. Not a simple task and one that can allow emotions to win out -- I would guess that one of the hardest things an art model balances is that interplay of energetic output and keeping ones' shit together. I think I was heading here with this shot to say something totally different but now I've forgotten what it was. If anyone got this far, chime in with a comment -- is this "sexy"? what caught your eye? how does it feel to YOU?
December 3, 2025 at 1:56 PM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Get up. Get out of bed. Drag a comb across my head. Or so the song goes. These winter days have only just begun and I'm already OVER it. I feel like there's a book bouncing around in my brain but it isn't quite ready to come out. Or SOMETHING. More in the alt-text. #thinky #muses
Is it erotica? Maybe to some but not, rather sadly, to me. With ten years of archive to wander through you might think that SOMETHING would fit the bill but I seem to gravitate toward more mysterious and emotional connectivity. Which brings me back to the question of where does this work belong? I ran across a fairly stereotypical "mens magazine" in my feed this morning and went to check it out only to find it terribly disappointing. Each individual picture is perfect and gorgeous (even if the women themselves were the overly-accentuated T&A caricatures that DEFINITELY do not interest me). Each picture exactly the same. Imagine for a moment with me the number of pictures that have been taken of an attractive woman pulling a bikini tight against herself. There may be more of those pictures than there are grains of sand on a Caribbean beach. That picture is the accumulating size of my despair at the limits of human imagination. NOT causing despair is this set with my long-time friend Jordan River. Jordan questions herself as much as I seem to and I absolutely love her for it. She is a graceful and enthusiastic partner for my stupidest ideas and a wonderful wit, to boot. The outlines of a tome are rattling around the desk, "RiverMuse" just needs another shoot or three. You'd think we'd have "enough" already but while Jordan has been responsible for a good amount of brilliance I continue to believe that we have not hit our pinnacle. We can do better, I truly believe.
December 1, 2025 at 6:40 PM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Sorry/Not Sorry to spam the world today. Don't want to do anything but edit and re-live the summer sun. #roadtrip #iamcalifornia #brunette #pdxphotographer #remotework
November 30, 2025 at 9:42 PM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Does everybody love sunsets? What's up with that? We captured a fairly perfect one on a remote stretch of beach. #roadtrip #summer #iamcalifornia #pdxphotographer
November 30, 2025 at 8:39 PM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Not, perhaps, my usual "style" but I would offer up the idea that the picture wanted what it wanted. I'd tag Lumi if I could figure out which profile is really her in the moment. #roadtrip #iamcalifornia #portrait
I've only met Lumi the once. We had spoken about working together at some previous time but it came together this last summer in Southern Oregon, she on her way back to California and me en route north and homeward. We had a couple days to explore one of my favorite waterfalls and work in a quick coastal sunset (always a hit or miss affair) and I quickly edited a set that was published in Dominante Magazine's October '25 issue. I question whether what I want to convey belongs in what used to be called "men's magazines", trapped between breathless exclamations of awaiting passion or puerile teasing. I think Lumi comes off here as, yes, beautiful, but MORE as a connected and naturally thoughtful person. I'd like to think that I'm striving for natural portraits rather than sexual pinups. I really like this shot.
November 30, 2025 at 7:18 PM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Thankful for so many things today but Eva and I talked about little else over breakfast than how wonderful @lucyartmodel.bsky.social really is and how much fun she's having on her current workshop! '- )
#artmodel #pose #perfectlywonderful #bacon
November 28, 2025 at 10:08 PM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
You ever just take a walk through the alleyway of history and be blown away by a glance? I downplayed this whole....well...no...there were just more consistent things elsewhere and I didn't examine this particular corner well enough at the time.

More in the alt-text.
We escaped to a not-snowy and not-really-cold mountain in the depths of winter (thanks George Bush!) and it turned out that the house was just painfully dark at that time of year. I set up a single light and we mostly played in the woods but there were a few corners where it seemed promising. This is definitely promising. I love working with Eva because there are these moments where she turns on the supermodel gaze and while I love the quirky and the fun and the weird that we tap into, the shapes and the poses, the smolder that she brings is SUCH a wildly accurate WOW that I can't help but be amazed. I think I'm glad that she's not this person all the time. It would be terrifying. This whole idea gets back to the lure and the awfulness of model photography. At its best we're exploring moments where the triangle of environment, model and photographer exceed their limitations and make real art. Sometimes one of those things takes precedence and we chase after it because the incandescent glow of That Moment is so achingly beautiful. Sometimes we're just chasing the buzz of cultural and genetic coding. I love this shot because she is being a fantastic creature. It's not sexual but it's certainly sex-Y and there are subtle triggers in the setting that set pulses racing. The fact that we did this while mainly giggling our asses off is a wonderful memory yet also beside the point. It's designed to get a reaction and it works. Success? I don't know. Is it figurative art, erotic art, is it art at all? I just do not know. I do love it, though. Hope you do, too.
November 20, 2025 at 5:00 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Another adventure with someone who was looking for answers through self-expression. We had three shoots over a couple months and the act of being in front of the camera seemed to invigorate her. She was wonderfully brilliant.
Beauty runs a gamut and I would hesitate to ascribe common origins to art models. In this case, she was working through having been a cutter as a teen and feeling disconnected from her body. We discussed shooting her scars very specifically but never got around to it before other life work took priority. The work we did still lingers as a favorite. It had a wonder and honesty to it that I think comes through.
November 19, 2025 at 10:08 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Once upon a time in a backyard jungle.
Dirty fun. Model Anon.
November 19, 2025 at 4:00 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
November 14, 2025 at 12:23 PM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
The sun went down too early and so did I so here I am at 3AM editing pictures from two years ago....and smiling all the way because @zoecwest.bsky.social is AWESOME. #roadtrip #highdesert #rustic #springtime #goldenlight

More in the alt-text.
I saw this cabin come and go on the rental lists and was super stoked when the stars aligned for us to stay there. I'll go on forever about how wonderful Zoe is -- like most of my favorite art models she has a warmly empathic nature but also a resounding individualism and independence that makes her very much herself. Fashion may be different but I don't think it's enough to just be "pretty" when it comes to art modeling. For one thing the outdoor-oriented sort that I know I gravitate to are often highly physical in their interactions with their environment. This is a strength exercise as well as an intellectual one to consider the surroundings and find a way to flow with or against them. There is something deeply satisfying about beauty in the midst of natural splendor and even more so when it engages the senses on every level. This particular expedition was "less planned" than some of my ideas, mainly because the location was far enough away that I just couldn't find time that Spring to scout enough. What scouting I WAS able to manage mainly shot down some of my ideas -- roads that had deteriorated over winter (and nearly shook me to death) crossed a few things off my list in a nod to common sense. Common sense? This has become something of a theme with desert trips the last few years. I can look back over a lot of trips that seemed to lack that quality but lately it seems like we've made better decisions. I'd still really like to find an opportunity to do a circuit around my favorite desert destinations with enough time to really dig into some of them.
November 14, 2025 at 12:23 PM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Still one of my favorite kisses, even of my own.
#red #kiss #pdx
November 10, 2025 at 2:58 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Disco beads and my favorite dance model. More in the alt-text. #muse #artmodel #pdxstyle #curlyhair #winter #darkart #shiny
Given any kind of choice I'll sing the praises of Lael nonstop. She is a beautiful person inside and out and I simply adore her. Our first meeting was literally on the side of a highway and we hiked up a hill to create one of my favorite images. My current thinking is that I hope to continue our arc for quite some time into the future. I look forward to dinners and laughter and more time with someone so impactful.
November 10, 2025 at 2:49 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
All we needed was for the wind to stop.
More in the alt-text.
#artmodel #roadtrip #unseasonablycold #deathvalley #perfect #desert #longhair #lonelyroad #endoftheroad #nevada
We had set out with goals. Looking back they were nebulous enough that we may have accomplished everything we set out to do. The trek itself, however, was beset by challenges from setting my 4WD on fire to a close call with being trapped by both ice and sand. Suspiciously tiny rocks that we expected to be bigger. Most problematic of all was unseasonably cold weather dropping into single digits and a persistent north wind that pushed the chill factor even further. But for all of that it was an amazing trip. Once in a while the wind died down and we bounced out of our shelter to play in the seemingly-balmy respite. We made a handful of pictures that remain among my favorites, placing an improbable human in an improbable landscape. We had the most amazingly FUN night in a bar that I've ever had and somebody else picked up the tab, willingly, so it didn't cost a dime. We saw some country that I had been curious about for years and made it home, mostly. One very slow turn around on a cliffside road that was rapidly moving past my ability to drive it....epic. Everything about the trip was epic. I can't wait to do it again.
November 8, 2025 at 6:18 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Music is such a joy, even when unlovely or perhaps unlistenable. The fact that someone had such an idiosyncratic vision is reason enough for it to exist.
More in the alt-text.
#piano #muse #music #vision
@jordanrivermuse.bsky.social
When I saw the piano on the side of the road with a "free" sign on it, I knew I had to have it. I didn't know the path it would take or how often I would revisit it in the future but here we are seven years later still seeing new things every time I look. Jordan has been a constant creative companion for a decade now -- her emotional connection and restlessness is SO powerful and I hope to continue finding moments with her as long as we can. She is absolutely magnificent.
October 26, 2025 at 2:17 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
The sun lowers earlier, the wind wraps around the house and pries at the corners of the doors. Which reminds me of a late-winter expedition with @lucyartmodel.bsky.social who is an absolute inspiration every day. #light #shadow #nudeart #oregonphotographer #whiteroom.
More in the alt-text.
How do I recall it? We had been out clambering around a deserted power plant and a frozen waterfall all day and our little ranch retreat turned out to be a crazy-alabaster place that lent itself neatly to some stark contrasts. Later I'd discover that the owner was a talented go-getter rebuilding her family legacy by hosting everything from raves to fly fishing on their properties and was part of my extended hippie-friend-family. Small world. It's become kind of amusing that all I can see when I go back to look at these shoots is what I SHOULD have done. It's never obvious in the moment but seems so clear in retrospect. But then there's the reimagining and the re-edit and something new and unexpected starts to click and I like what we did. Sometimes a lot. I've spent hours and hours pouring over these images and every time I learn a new tool or technique it's fun to come back and see how that new interpretation changes the way I feel about a set of images. Freakin' amazing, this little adventure is.
October 23, 2025 at 3:25 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Just a few blocks away from where I type there is an inflatable frog facing off against armed thugs who have not yet found their sense of shame and had the good sense to quit. We are the people and we will win this fight. We place our heads on the chopping block deliberately. We resist.
I had borrowed a low-lying fog machine ("low-lying" is a type) and it never occurred to me as I poured gallon after gallon of water into the machine that all that water was actually GOING SOMEWHERE.....which happened to be every piece of fabric and very much the carpet. LOL.
October 13, 2025 at 1:38 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Points to Dominante Magazine for....well...for being FRENCH, all the more exotic since America has become a Puritanic wasteland of retarded intellect. Big points to the wonderful Lumi for following up and making this shoot finally happen! #pnwlife #oregonphotographer #roadtrip
October 8, 2025 at 11:34 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Hmmmmm.....I realized that @jordanrivermuse.bsky.social is starting to make up an awful lot of my feed here. We go back quite a bit now and I continue to be so very impressed with her as a candid, engaged and emotional force.

More in the alt-text. #spooky #darkart #grotesque #pdxphotographer
While there have been distinct phases to my photography, I think the through line is simply my relationships with women and a sort of therapy around that. I began model photography after seeing aerial dancers moving through patterns of light and fitting out a spare room in my warehouse to experiment with this idea. Coincidentally I was undergoing personal upheaval and for a while my friends gently pointed out that I was portraying women as monsters. Jordan, among others, was instrumental in providing stepping stones to a fuller emotional range. Over the previous decade I had become cut off from my female friends and I needed to reconnect and relearn my communication. I have always had a lot of great positive reinforcement with crew and clients but to explore intimacy as an artistic form was new territory. Hell, making "art" was new to me in this format. Growing up in the Pacific NW had insulated me from a lot of casual misogyny. My mother ran a business and my grandmother had run a business. I grew up with women being equal by default, without much discussion. It seemed normal to me but my foray into model photography coincided with a cultural shift that has seen that normalcy attacked. I grew up in a conservative home but not a stupid one. My parents were modest but not prudish. I've never seen nudity as inherently sexual and nude art has always been accepted as a cornerstone of human art. We come from women. We all have mothers and sisters, wives and lovers. The erotic, the nurturing, the spiritual and the beautiful are all bound up in women's bodies. Should we treat women differently? Maybe. But when we think of the inward rigors of pregnancy we should build comforting nests for the baby and the mother to commune with each other. To me that implies placing healthcare and reproductive rights in a central position in order to make every pregnancy a wanted one. Child rearing is not, in and of itself, a gender role. Men and women and aunties and cousins and grandparents all play different roles and are perfectly capable of playing whatever role is necessary for their child in their circumstance. I grew up with a working mother who taught me how to answer the phone and the importance of her work to our family. Those lessons stick with me today. I won't pretend to have definitive answers to some questions or even posit that there ARE definitive answers. But respect for others and their choices seems like a great place to start and giving every person the support and resources to be their best selves would seem to follow. The human form is capable of communication. It can be tortured. It can be lithe. We can bend ourselves to express loneliness or weariness or leap into the sky with joy or anticipation or resistance. Capturing those things is a wild path of little adventures to create moments that support people as they communicate with themselves and the world around them. I'm deeply touched and honored at the adventures the past decade has brought and pretty proud of the work that's come out of it. I still struggle with how to present it and how it was captured in the moment. Sometimes I want to go back and have a do-over so that I can do it better but every time I try it seems to be a different moment and we wind up with something new. Ce la vie.
October 8, 2025 at 4:23 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
One thing led to another and all of a sudden I am hours deep into rethinking my edit approach to this entire shoot.

More in the alt-text.

#americantrucking #piano #wet
The light from the mostly-translucent roof was an amazement as soon as I rolled up the back door. The piano, a roadside score that I had turned around to haul aboard, sat there in what I could only think of as a semi-illuminated murk. If I have a weakness it involves dim light and pale, nearly glow-in-the-dark, women. I promptly called two of them and spent the next couple days diving into this whole thing. Eight years later I am still returning to the files and finding new ways to think about the edits. Fun fact, this piano wound up in an art gallery and eventually was gutted and reimagined as a fire-producing honky-tonk attraction in Portland's Pioneer Square during the Winter Light Festival. One of the crew on that remarked on the distinct scent of coconut that he had noticed inside the piano.
October 7, 2025 at 11:30 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
I'm so glad that there's a place for nipples. It BOTHERS me no end to leave them out as if society itself will come to a screeching halt should we realize that women possess such a thing. Not shown? The three busloads of Catholic elementary children who arrived moments later....
October 7, 2025 at 3:33 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
Are there questions to be answered? Banished to the wilderness. #pacificnw #pnwsummer #pnwphotographer #camping #followthemuse
I asked her how she was feeling and she walked to the edge of the water and drew a handful of mud with her hand and began daubing it on herself. "Like this," she replied, some time later.
September 30, 2025 at 2:39 AM
exhibitphotopdx.bsky.social
End of Seasons.

I had a delightful dinner at a seasonal pop-up, homemade Puerto Rican in a tiny shop at the end of a dock on the sun-kissed Columbia River. More (and more maudlin, perhaps) in the alt-text.

#pnwphotographer #seasons #autumn #rain #wilting
Now that I've seen and spent time with the Mississippi I can't unsee the comparison. I have lived with the Columbia as an example of "a river" -- blue or steel grey, a slight rise and fall with the distant tides, a stately sweep. The Big Muddy lives up to its name and that roiling, churning brown carrying the remains of the Midwest toward the Gulf of Mexico is distinctive. Powerful. Menacing. As "mighty" as the Columbia undeniably IS, it rarely has menace unless in full wild flood. It's a very West Coast vibe. Lots of recreation, inviting to hang out around and maybe plunge into. I cannot imagine a resident of New Orleans thinking that they should go down to the banks and jump into the Miss. So there we were enjoying the last sunny day of summer. My companion was telling me that she has been taking firefighting training through a community program and I was reminded that I admire her for her level-headedness. The past five years she has turned her attentions to carpentry and wood-working, masonry and now community response. Damn. Prepping for The Apocalypse in the most practical manner. I'm on the bleeding-edge of GenX, a few years earlier and I'd have been the back end of the Boomers. Glad not to be because I blame the Boomers for a lot of our current problems. Not individually, so much, but the social pressures and vagaries of history combined to leave them holding the bag of dissolution across a number of areas. And I've had a ringside seat to the end of things from public telephones to car culture to, apparently, America itself. My dinner companion and I share an instinctive feeling about politics, at least in that we disapprove of grifters and shitheels. Perhaps that extends to a sorrow at the state of gullibility we have achieved as a nation. I used to think that some disdain or the stupid was part of my fundamental conservatism but maybe it's just that I'm a snob. SHE, on the other hand, seems to be more accepting of her fellows and more gracefully forgiving of their foibles. She's a bridge-builder and I admire that quite a bit. It's more constructive than my snobbery. The air itself had a finality behind the warmth. Autumn is coming and the trees along the boulevards have begun to show signs of change. The backyard harvest has been good this year and despite having never watered the apple trees their fruit is less woody, more delicious, than I had any right to expect. The pears I'm still not sure how to approach but a bumper crop of cherries, grapes and figs rounds out the yard. Is this the last year of easy food? Can the American ag-industry swap to robot harvesting in time to seamlessly replace the workers we are turning away? Will Medicaid recipients flock to the fields in such numbers that the harvests will be successful? I'm seeing little bits and pieces about this (mainly very negative) in niche journalism but nobody seems to be talking about the idea that we built our economy on the labor of the undocumented. Cheap labor to keep cheap food on American tables. Add in tariffs and collapsing international markets and it sure seems that we're going to face some interesting food problems next year. Maybe we'll all get thin again? So I found myself in between rain squalls on a hillside of fading grass. A heavily-trafficked tourist spot that was somehow eerily vacant. The mood was fitting and I feel like we captured an emotion. Successes of the day are never to be regretted.
September 21, 2025 at 8:57 PM