LINK TO GREGG FRIEDBERG GALLERY ON THE NAKED MAN PROJECT

Gregg Friedberg grew up in Columbus, Ohio but for many years has lived in Upper Sandusky, a rural county seat, and nowadays spends half of each year in Guanajuato, Mexico where he participates in the bilingual arts-and-culture scene and gives regular readings.

Professionally he’s been a partner in a computer software company, writing applications for Ohio county government, but has always written poetry, is happiest when writing sustained sequences, loosely but not conventionally narrative, treating a matrix of themes from an evolving perspective.

An example is The Best Seat Not in the House (Main Street Rag, 2010) which examines the vexed relationship between Creator and creature, whether God and man or author and protagonist.

In What’s Wrong, a longer sequence, the first-person narrator is a refugee from American marketing culture.

Friedberg is completing a collection of photographs with corresponding texts, The Artist’s Reception, the result of the black-and-white figure photography project he’s been working on the past several years.  The texts, which also tell a story, incorporate some of the wittier comments that have been posted with the photos at the art site deviantart.com.  Excerpts have appeared in the art magazines, Noisy Rain and Vitruvian Lens.

And for the past ten years Friedberg has been a member of Frank Bidart’s summer workshop at Skidmore College.

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Interview with Gregg Friedberg:

Where are you? 

I live half the year in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, a rural county seat, and the other half in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, a colonial town on the high plateau of central Mexico and a center for culture and arts.

Who are you? 

A poet, and – to the extent to which these and others of my photos justify the claim – a photographer and model.

What kind of work you do?

I’m an “emeritus” partner in a custom-computer-software firm that writes programs for Ohio county government:  a spectrum of applications from, for examples, real estate valuation and taxation to the common pleas court scheduling, docketing, and accounting.

Are you a full time artist and create all the time?

Nowadays I try to be, but lately have been concentrating on revising past work, waiting for the inspiration needed to embark on something new. 

What compels you to photograph male nudes?

Through most of my life, it never occurred to me.  Then, one day, browsing books of dance photographs, I came upon the photo by Annie Leibovitz of David Parsons nude, dancing.  It induced an epiphany:  the sudden need to be the subject of one such indubitably memorable, beautiful photo – absurd inasmuch as I had no pertinent credentials!  But the desire persisted, and an occasion presented itself to try:  a photographer friend suggested I pose for him.  A couple of years later, when he moved away, I decided to continue on my own.  The photos in this selection are all from this latter phase, which is to say, self portraits.

Do you work in other mediums?

Much of my creative energy and attention goes to poetry.  I’m happiest writing poem sequences:  very loosely narrative, treating a matrix of themes from an evolving perspective.  There too the homoerotic importantly serves as inspiration, so for me poetry’s another ‘medium’ for communicating the emotion, psychology, and aesthetics of the male nude.

What are some of the obstacles you have or had to overcome to become a creative soul?

Having to meet “creature” needs requires a lot of time and energy, and I’ve never been good at “partitioning” the day.  So for many years my best energy went to creating computer programs rather than art.

And even now, when I myself (mostly) am in charge of how my time is spent, I find that – very unfortunately – my muse often does not cooperate, and then I’m better off not even trying to create new work.  So then I direct my attention to past work:  revising poems or refinishing photos.

What would you say is your style or approach to your imagery?  (you seem to use a lot of natural light in the things I am seeing)

I think my style shows forthrightly the influence of dance and traditional figure drawing, painting, and sculpture.  My concern’s always been primarily the poses, their translation into two dimensions:  lines, proportion – and body language, especially the expressive potential of the limbs and hands, over that of the face.  And – related, I feel, to this matter of expressiveness of the body, how it arranges itself in space – I much prefer natural light.

What has influenced you the most?  Any particular person, body of work, art movements.

True to my original inspiration, dance photography, for me, continues as the greatest influence:

grace of line and proportion as translated into the two dimensions of a photo.

What is your personal connection to the erotic side of this sort of imagery or subjects.

I’ve always felt – and identified it with antique Greek sensibility -- the erotic appetite as the great exhilarator.  It’s never been morally vexed for me in the way that it is for American culture generally, which cannot leave off demonizing it. 

The sensibility that celebrates and refines it is, I think, characterized by grace and strength, and a vision of the perfect, the glorious – utopian even – and so runs the risk of becoming conventional and bland.  But then to be abidingly interesting any art must involve a secondary essence of a nature at least somewhat “contrary” to the first.   For me and my work, it’s spiritual gravitas, the central drama of the human condition:  you can be good 99.99% of the time, but as you soon as you lapse (which is assumed inevitable – a given), only the lapse counts:  as in the Garden of Eden and Greek tragedy.

After the Party

The boy unbuttoning, shrugging off his shirt,

LINK TO E. HIRANO GALLERY ON THE NAKED MAN PROJECT

E. Hirano was one of the first people to befriend me when I began showing my image on a site called Man Art in the summer of 2010.  We instantly hit it off and began to talk to each other as artists.  I became fascinated by his images and the particular style in which he expressed himself and always excited to see when he posted something new on the site.  Then I the fall of 2010 he created a new group on the Red Bubble site called Noisy Rain which he invited me to join.  We both had the vision to showcase these unknown artist who dabbled in male erotic art and he began an online publication with the Noisy Rain group that would be presented as an actual free magazine that would showcase a few artist with each addition.  The magazine is astonishingly beautiful in it’s form and presentation.  I knew early on that I would want to feature his images here and he was one of the first artist I asked if I could showcase. 

~Terry J Cyr 2011

I paint since I can remember, capturing life has always been part of my life, later I found that human body was the perfect object for the expression of my artistic needs. Experimenting with almost every art form through the years, my today work falls almost exclusively in the visual arts, being the male erotica my principal subject.

Intimacy is the feeling of being closed to someone, is when two people share their emotions, fears and desires, able to be emotionally open with one another, able to genuinely trust one another, and feel able to take the risk of being vulnerable, share quite moments or be able to watch someone peacefully sleeping next to you, a universal need that keep us away from loneliness.

I wanted this to be a representative glimpse of a mundane event, just a moment in the whole concept, transforming it into something more ethereal and less carnal.

Interview with E. Hirano:

What is the medium you work in? Some of it looks like paintings and some digital?

I mostly start working with pencil and paper, I always try to draw my ideas, and these ideas can come from several places, sometimes from something I read, see, hear or dream, once I have a clear vision of what I like I make the sketch on paper, then I finish it on a digital medium. all are made as painting but my brushes and canvas are digital. I used to work in traditional mediums but not anymore, I found a perfect solution on digital ambients.

I have read about your influences in various styles but your images of the male nudes are very empowering? What inspired you to create such strength in those figures? How did you settle or evolve toward this style? Does this style have a name?

My inspirations have changed over the years, but they never had left me, on the contrary, they have showed me the path on where I like to walk as an artist, I have to say that my primal influences were my parents, they both loved painting, I grow up surrounded by brushes, oils, canvas and art books, from them I discovered the great painters and art forms, and in some way those elements also helped to understand my sexuality, because I realized at very young age that, my likes always followed the art that used the male figure as a way of expression,   like the self portraits of Albrecht Dürer, or the incredible masculine art of Giovanni Battista Moroni. and an endless list of other artists that helped shaped my artistic personality, then my art has never been settle, always evolving and about my style, I prefer to denominate it as the landscape I see right now in my life, and this landscape is based on a conversation between men about the simplicity of Japanese art, the drama of the classical painters and the defined lines of modern art, and if I had to put a name on it I guess I would call it Nu-Decó.  

My images and styles becomes a reflection of who I am and where I have been sexually and what I find most appealing in a romantic sense. Do you work in a similar way?

Of course my art it is also a refection of what I am, but not exactly with a self sexual reference, at least not in simple way, it´s true that my art is related to sexual issues, but it speaks more about a state of mind,  about this ephemeral moment when we discover the power of our bodies, this state of mind that tell us about our sexuality for the first time, like in my painting Looker Room, this painting is more about what happen outside the frame, it´s about the eyes that pay attention to this image, about the guy sitting next to the man in the actual painting ,scanning this vision and realizing for the first time how beautiful an equal body can be, powerful, almost tender, a fragment in a masculine world. My paintings are about these emotions, moments of the solitude of a man, instants that redefine our love life.

I see that you always mention a Japanese/Mexican heritage. Would explain this heritage more in depth? What influence does this have on your creation? 

I was born in Mexico, grow up here, sleep and eat here, but I have never have a strong bonding with Mexican culture,  there are obviously things that I love about this country, but I have always feel myself as a foreigner in my country in some way, but this feeling comes way before I was born, My grandfather was a Royal Navy sailor in Japan, who self exile here in Mexico during the war, he came from family with the economic possibilities to pay for his son to leave Japan in turbulent times, so he came to Mexico because here was a neutral territory during war, he found the love here and grow up another family, he eventually stopped talking about his Japanese family, and interrupted the contact with them,  and to make this worse, his (My) family lived very close to Nagasaki in Kyushu Island, so after the Atomic Bomb we lost the story, I don´t know if he kept the contact with his family after that ( he was a man of few words) or not, but what I know is that I grow up with this feeling that I lost part of my past with that, when my Granddad died, my father tried to find our Japanese family until his dead with no results, many Japanese people that came with my granddad did find their families after the war, but my family was lost. We know that we have family out there and I also know that is now my responsibility to try to find them, so that is way I always refer myself as Japanese-Mexican, because it is my way to honored my family, wherever they are, and my  heritagenot only influences my art but my whole existence.

I am also fascinated by your strong connection to family, your sister seems to have a big influence, and writing scripts. Do you care to flesh out some of that history? 

My Family is a small family, that is why we want/need to be close, and it is true that I have a strong connection with them, but probably you are talking about something I wrote at my blog about my "sister", if you are quoting that, then we are talking about my best friend, I call her my sister, she is a very talented girl with whom I work. We have been writing film scripts since we were very young, and we now actually working in an  independent feature film,  but working as independent filmmakers... you know the money always is a drawback, but that never has stopped us from doing what we want to do. This film has been canned for a while now, but we are sure that it finally it´ll see the light next year, right now we are also working on another script that is going to be our most ambitious project to date. As you can see I´m a guy who can´t be quiet for too long.

LINK TO E. HIRANO GALLERY ON THE NAKED MAN PROJECT