HOPI SOCIAL DANCERS

I photographed a group of Hopi social dancers a year ago, the group mostly from Hotvilla a village on the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona is named Nuvatukya’ovi  Sinom.   Some of these photographs will be published in the September iSSue of ARIZONA HIGHWAYS.


      John Running photographed the Hopi Dance Group - “Nuvatukya’ovi  Sinom” on the 4th & 5th of July, 2009.    This year again he had a unique opportunity when the group “Nuvatukya’ovi  Sinom” was scheduled to perform at Heritage Square during the Fourth of July weekend.  He invited them to use the Flagstaff Photography Center to change into their traditional dance clothes and then set up a studio space and made these photos prior to and after their performances.   He had the oppotunity to photograph three different dances, Clown Dance, Rainbow Dance and the Watermaiden Dance.

John Running has been photographing American Indians throughout his forty year career as a freelance photographer.  His book “Honor Dance” celebrates his work with Native Americans.     National Geographic Photographer, William Albert Allard wrote the following about him in the preface to “Honor Dance”.

Running is perhaps best known for his photographs of Indians, but instead of considering himself a specialist, he considers himself to be simply a photographer of people.  This is an important distinction.  The kind of approach this photographer takes in his work is transferable to any part of the world, to any society.   He is never just photographing the trappings of religious beliefs or the costumes of ideology; he is always photographing human beings.
       

A New Post Test

Natalia has been my muse and friend for years.  I re-work photos from time to time.  Today - my son's birthday and I gave him the cast of the sabertooth tigers' skull Natalia is holding.

THE FIBONOCCI SERIES - A Composition Exercise

The universial Golden Mean

Trisha Knows Eland

Trisha is a traveling model - she found here way to my studio in Flagstaff, Arizona.

We made photos of her with an eland skull.

MORE TO COME

I made a series of photos of Taylor with the skull of a kudu out on some sand dunes - about 75 miles north of my Flagstaff Arizona studio - on the Navajo Reservation.

and there is more

A NEW POST

I have not posted anything for a long time

but here is some new work - a new concept I make photos with an old Polaroid Camera - uses a Film made by Fuji that fits the Polaroid Fuji 3000s which has a beautiful paper negative. It is the part you usually toss away/ I keep it, scan it and play with it.

See my play

There is a lot more.

GENETIC IMPRINTS -the photos - the book

Genetic Imprints :: Muse of the Image

The image comes first. In the beginning; before there was language there

 was a non-verbal way of comprehending the world.   

There was the image  -  now except in our dreams we tend to translate images to words.  

Now after I made these images I am trying to find words and it comes to mind that these photos these images of women and animal skulls are more about something from our deep past - from deep back to the time of the ice.

I have read recently,  the idea that back at the time of our emergence that the female,  that woman, was more than a fertility deity, more than mother, she was also the first practitioner of medicine, and magic that in fact she was Creator.  Back in our stone age emergence God was female and this still imprints our genetic codes. 

I find these images in my studio, first with my outer eye and then my inner eye takes over influenced by genetic memories deep in my DNA.   These are the genetic imprints.  The image come first.   I see it in front of me  -  a woman holding an animal skull.   I   believe I suggest to the model, “this is about life not death”.  She works with some direction at first but soon it seems to me that as she carries and caresses her animal totem she become soul carried and spirit guide.   

I respond to this by submitting myself to the model, and all I do is records what she offers, 

we become collaborators as we respond to our Genetic Imprints.

 See my Book "Genetic Imprints" at Book Blurb  http://www.blurb.com/my/book/detail/84466