Apogee Photo Magazine

DON MURPHY PLAYS WITH FIRE

I've been doing artwork most of my life. When I was a child, I took my first photograph of our front yard using a Baby Brownie. I didn't save it. Nobody could tell what it was supposed to represent. Much later I spent several years in the Midwest, working as a newspaper and magazine writer/photographer.

I continued in a similar position for a year after I moved to Alaska. I still freelance occasionally for the local Fairbanks newspaper.

For many years I labored in the art department at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. I liked being an "express student" (taking only one or two courses at a time with no aspirations for a degree), because I could do as I pleased. I taught myself acetylene welding and even earned an "A" for a nude bronze statue of one of my girlfriends.

Eventually, I offered a show of photographs of nudes and was asked why. I said, "Maybe it's to shock people, because they want to suppress nudity and sex so much." However, I do believe there is real beauty in nude bodies. This was several years ago, and my pictures were very tame, but I had some run-ins with the locals, nonetheless.

For example, one day I caught a large man tearing down posters of my show. He appeared to be too old to be a student. He looked more like a stereotypical pipeline worker in his heavy work shirt, boots, and close-cut hair. He acted embarrassed when I stopped him. He tried to push a badly printed Gospel of St. John toward me.

I told him I wasn't doing pornography and asked him to come to the show to see for himself.

He said, "No, I couldn't do that. I don't think my body could stand it."

I felt like saying, "If you have troubles with sex, that's your problem!"

In those prosperous days (the '70's and early 80's) of the oil pipeline, Alaska was a place of great potential. The straights would call it a "hippy" culture. I had a reputation as a photographer of women, but I never went to bed with any of my models. The simple truth is an artist can't have his mind on sex when he's trying to draw, paint, or photograph a model. There isn't time, and such thoughts destroy his focus on his work.

The reality about an artist's focus sometimes came as a rude surprise to novice models in our drawing classes. A beautiful young thing would pose before a crowd of students for the first time, thinking she was going to be a sex object. She soon discovered that the young man staring with singular concentration at her naked body was actually worried about the line where her shoulder became her arm, why her head didn't look right, and how long he had before she might move and foul up his perspective. The girl soon learned modeling was only hard work. She got yelled at for shifting, even when she had developed cramps from holding a pose too long.

My interest in spectacular natural phenomena eventually led me to Hawaii, where I escaped the Alaskan winters. Then I became interested in sandwich slides, where I would superimpose a natural scene with a model and print that. I did a lot of frost pictures from window panes, which were spectacular although difficult to do in Hawaii. (Hawaii was an ideal location in which to find nude models without goose bumps, however.)

A few years ago, I began experimenting with computer art as therapy for my handicapped kids. (I was an attendant on a special education school bus.) We put together a book of pictures which the children had either requested or drawn--everything from crude sqiggles to castles with knights and dragons. Walter wanted a castle. It had to have exactly his colors, a young girl in a window to be rescued, and a knight on a white horse--the knight to be Walter himself, of course.

I printed the picture for him. The sun was the wrong color, the dragon wasn't right, etc., etc. I had to make the picture several times.

The book had a color cover and contained over twenty pages, including explanatory text. It was a tremendous success. My boss at the school bus company wanted a copy. Each child had to have at least one copy, and the local library put up a display of the pictures. We papered the inside of the bus. In the end, we completed a "press run" of close to fifty complete books, an arduous job on my little Apple IIC.

Later, I grew intrigued by more sophisticated computer pictures. Currently, I have a library of almost 10,000 slides of nearly everything, and I can not only put them together as sandwich slides, but also paint, change CLUTs, and perform other manipulations on my MAC. The potential is tremendous.

Over half of the pictures I've included here were straight shots of things which happened at practice or controlled house burns by the Steese Volunteer Fire Department, of which I was a member for eight years. (Very few pictures were taken at fires we were called to put out--mainly because my captain might have grown perturbed if I were snapping photographs instead of helping extinguish the fire.) The car burning in "Face in Fire" was also a practice burn.

The figures in some of the fire pictures were added later, of course, usually by Photoshop. I've discovered layering, and can now put just a ghost of a figure in the flames. "Face in Fire"'s face is from a picture originally taken of my friend Paulette, then turned negative. The fire (eyes, etc.) was from NIH Image's changing pallette feature.

"Bad Hair Day No. 5" is from a series of a picture of a beautiful woman named Mara at an abandoned sugar cane mill in Hawaii. The model and I were thrown out shortly afterward. I had permission from the owner of the mill to take the pictures, but one particular red-necked foreman didn't know that. (I think he was shocked at seeing a naked woman) The picture was put through the NIH Image palette-changing feature and came out as several almost completely different products. Most of my NIH pictures are cleaned up and worked on in Photoshop.

"St Joan's Meditation" has quite a history. It is part of a series from NIH Image and show St. Joan burning up. I haven't had any comments from church groups, but the pictures have been popular in several gallery shows. The most spectacular treatment was a three-minute movie of morphed stills (32 morphs of two pictures each, creating about 900 frames) run slowly, with weird music added. "St. Joan..." and some other movies (15 minutes altogether) were the most popular entry in the COLLECTION gallery show of Foundry Arts in Denver, February, l996.

I have a difficult time describing exactly how my complicated fantasy pictures were made. They evolve. Many techniques and experiments are tried, so it's difficult--if not impossible--to go back and do the same thing over again. Luckily, I don't have to. One of the beauties of art work on the computer is that you can save many copies of many stages of your work and go back for another background or a different spectacular scene, etc. and retrieve any stage. Many components, such as suns, fire, etc., are used more than once, and some of the pieces that make up the final picture may come from slides taken twenty years ago.

"Family of Fire and Ice" is a straight Kodachome slide of my dining room window in winter. The golden light comes from the low sun, and the "family" are frozen water drippings, upside down. Viewed from one angle, it's water drips; upside down it's a family. The golden color was enhanced in Photo Shop.

I often sell 8x10 inch prints from my HP 550c computer printer for $100 unframed. Better and more stable prints can be made locally with a dye transfer printer, and the sizes could be larger, but the price would be much higher.

There is so much more to learn with changing and improving technology and techniques. Best of all, the prices of equipment are coming down! As I told a young friend of mine, "I'm just beginning a new life. I hope my body can stay together long enough (30-40 years) so I can get something done."

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