Ari On The Salt Flats

I am so in love with Ari. One day alone with him out on the barren salt flats of Utah and my life was changed. It was storming in town and in the middle of a torrential downpour I realized I was flat broke and had a shoot in an hour with Ari. Our first. I drove home and pulled together enough quarters to get some gas. No money even for a bottle of water. I was an hour late but Ari didn't give up on me. We drove two hours out to the salt flats near the Utah/Nevada border and by the time we got there Ari's gentle voice had calmed me.

We never discussed what we would do - I just told him I wanted to take some pictures of him. In the back of the car I had a wooden bench and some ropes. Each of us grabbed an end of the bench and we walked a half mile out onto the salt flats. Within a few moments Ari was naked - we were so connected by then that I didn't half to ask and he didn't have to wonder; his clothes simply came off and there before me was one of the most beautiful people I'd ever seen. All six feet five of him. My heart raced and tears welled up in my eyes. I felt something shifting inside of me.

A serious beating at the hands of the grim reaper a few years earlier had left me wounded, frightened and withdrawn. I knew I was losing my grip and the only thing I could think of to do was to pick up my cameras and start taking pictures again. I saw Ari one day in the grocery store and as I looked up at him all I could do was point to my chin and then his and say, "Maori?" The most beautiful smile spread across his mouth as he looked at me in wonderment and said, "Why yes. How did you know?" A few days later he was standing before me naked out on the salt flats in the barren wastelands of the Great Salt Lake Desert.

A heroin addict at 12, Ari's soul has been tempered by something I will likely never understand. But what I do know is that the immensity of his gentleness and love changed me that day out there on the desert. I knew that what I was seeing through my lens was the magic I needed to get my life going again. It was like Ari had relit my pilot light and I was feeling the fires of creativity warming me up.

But it was even more than that and I'm not sure that I will ever understand it, much less be able to explain it. Sometimes just to be in the presence of extraordinary people transforms us, with or without our consent or cooperation. All we have to do is be there.

With Ari that day on the desert my life as an artist got a new start. From out of nowhere all of these amazing people started showing up, one more naked than the next. One more beautiful and more eccentric than the next. And on and on it went. And continues still. Every time I see Ari he throws his arms around me and doesn't let go. There is something sacred between us. These pictures are a reflection of all that; and something more that just has to be understood in the thousand words that each of them is worth.