The Comfort Zone

 

The minute I walked into her home yesterday, I knew the look... Dorothy was not looking forward to our photo session. The first thing that I needed to do was to find her comfort zone. I pulled out my iPod, small Altec Lansing speaker and cued up Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66.

We started the session with Dorothy standing... then sitting on an apple box... then sitting on the floor... The images looked better with each posing change, but we weren't there yet.

Then I asked her to lie on the sofa... BINGO! Now to set the lights. In the background... The 5th Dimension's One Less Bell To Answer is playing.

• First bounce one Dynalite head off the white ceiling.
  
• Next place another Dynalite head w/a grid to the left rear of Dorothy to create a hair light.
  
• Place a reflector below the subject for fill.
  
• Used the shutter speed to control the outdoor light tones.
  

Behind the lens info:

• Nikon D300 w/80-200 f2.8
  
• 1/80 f/8 @ 200 iso
  

Thank you Dorothy for the opportunity to create images for your new book!

Now... meet Dorothy.

About my book, and a bit of my bio:

American Fanatics is my fourth full-length book of poems, forthcoming this fall from the University of Pittsburgh Press. My poems are always illuminated darkly! This particular book, my first collection since 9/11, investigates faith and fanaticism and the fine, sometimes indiscernible line separating the two--and not just religious faith, but "secular" faith, too--the beliefs that drive our choices every day in the postmodern world in general, and in America in particular. There's a lot of gallows humor in these poems, a lot of pop culture be-bop, portraits of some of "America's lesser gods," like Aimee Semple McPherson, Joseph Smith, John Brown, and a Victorian psychic "fasting girl" named Mollie Fancher, but also dark believers like Timothy McVeigh. The title poem, "American Fanatics," was written during the second Bush administration. Here's a few stanzas:

Reading the newspaper lately,

you'd think America had been educated

in a single ray of handsome and murderous light by which we see individual belief is everything, being free.

If not now, when?

the fanatic asks.

If not me, the president says, then who?

("American Fanatics")

As I said, this is my fourth book of poems. My first book, All of the Above (1991) won the Barnard College New Women Poets Prize, and my second, The Post-Rapture Diner (1996), won an American Book Award. My most recent book, Rouge Pulp, was published in 2002. In addition to poems I write essays on contemporary poetry; this fall my article, "Baby Boom Poets and the New Zeitgeist," appeared in the literary magazine Prairie Schooner. I've won Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Other Honors include two Pushcart Prizes, the Emily Clark Balch Prize, and the Grand Prize from the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, and I've been asked to read my poetry at the Library of Congress as well as at universities and arts centers across the country. I live in Los Angeles with my husband Phil Matero and my two sons Andrew and Dante. I'm a Professor of English and Creative Writing in the English Department at California State University, Northridge and live in Los Angeles.