February 2021 - Tony Ward Studio

Bob Shell: Letters From Prison

The Politics of Incarceration

Back in September of 2020, a federal court ruled that the IRS could not deny any U.S. citizen the CARES Act stimulus money simply because she/he was incarcerated. In early October the Virginia Department of Corrections provided each of us with a 1040 form and instructions on how to apply for the $ 1,200 checks. We all filled out the forms and mailed them to the IRS immediately. So far as I can tell, no one who applied by mail has gotten a penny yet. Those who had friends or family apply for them on the Internet got their first checks long ago, and some have gotten their second ones. That’s about five months since we mailed in our forms! That’s pretty ridiculous, in my opinion. I can always use money!

I wrote on behalf of myself and others to the law firm that sued the IRS, asking for their help. In response they sent me a letter saying to go on the IRS website, call the IRS’s 800 number, or call them for information. Who do they think they’re dealing with? We can’t go on the Internet, we can’t call 800 numbers, and we can’t call them! Their advice is useless to us, all members of the class they sued on behalf of! Like many people on the outside, they don’t understand the restrictions we labor under.

Yes, we have so-called email, but I can’t enter someone’s email address into the system. They must do it from their end. My email ‘address book’ doesn’t even show the address, just the person’s name!

What we have is not real email.

So, because we lack Internet access we wait months for our money! The Business Office here says the IRS is releasing the checks in a slow trickle, five or so per week. There are over 1,000 men here, the majority of whom had to apply by mail. At five checks a week, it’ll take years! If I sound angry, I am. I’m in prison, yes, but I’m still a citizen, with as much right to that money as any other citizen! If I owe the IRS money, they make me pay interest for every day I’m late, but they’re sure not paying us interest for their delay.

People keep asking me how I’m progressing on the legal front. The answer is that I’m not, at least right now. Our law library is closed, so I can’t get on a computer to do my research, and the Virginia courts are operating under a declaration of judicial emergency, meaning they’re only performing basic functions. All my court deadlines are on hold until the Virginia Supreme Court ends the emergency. I’ll have 90 days then to file my briefs. My two suits to get my convictions overturned are stalled because of this, as is my suit to get my forest back. This last has been made all the more poignant by a book I’m reading.

‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ is the name of a wonderful book by Peter Wohlleben, German forester, who has his own forest.

We don’t think of trees feeling and acting. Wohlleben tells us that’s largely because trees live at a different speed from us. Our nerve impulses move along our neural pathways very fast, in milliseconds. But similar impulses in trees crawl along, taking seconds to move an inch. Time is stretched for trees, compressed for us. To us, it seems that trees act in slow motion, because their lives are unhurried. But they do feel, and they do communicate. A mother tree reckognizes her offspring and favors them by supplying nourishment the younger trees need. The forest community provides nourishment to sick trees, even keeping stumps alive until they can grow into trees again.

A forest is a community, with the complex conversation taking place underground between roots, where we can’t see it. A symbiosis between tree roots and fungi takes place right under our noses — or feet.

This book has made me appreciate my forest even more and made me even more determined to get it back. As a famous person once said, “I have not yet begun to fight!”

Meanwhile, life here continues in lockdown. We get out of our cells into our common area a few hours each day, which is why I can send/receive emails, but we’re fed in our cells, and only leave the building to go to the medical department, or to go to the gym, where they’re vaccinating us.

We’ve all gotten the first of two injections of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. I’m due for number two on the 18th. The vaccine hit me hard. My whole left side was painful for days. My cellmate spent the day after in bed, with chills, fever, nausea, the whole gamut of side effects. Some people had no reaction at all. The nurses told us the harder it hits you, the better, since that means your immune system has been triggered to produce antibodies.

Some medical authorities are saying that because this damnable virus is mutating rapidly, we may need annual booster shots for each new strain. Guess maybe they could give it to us along with our annual flu shot.

We’ve had quite a few people here, inmates and staff, catch the disease. Some have had to be hospitalized, and some have died, including a friend of mine I’d known for eight years.

In here we deal with a man based on how he comports himself. We really don’t pay attention to what he’s in for, and usually don’t even know. Of course, there are those who delight in knowing, and in spreading rumors. A prison is a community. I’ve been the victim of rumermongers, based on a totally false rumor started by some lowlifes years ago. It goes away, and periodically pops its ugly head up again. I just ignore it, and carry on being myself. Life’s too short to worry about stupid people telling stupid tales.

The COVID lockdown has also delayed completion of my next book. I’m calling it COSMIC DANCE II as a working title, but may publish it under another title. I’ll let everyone know when it’s published.

About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author and former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 13th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read Bob Shell’s, first essay on civil war, click here: https://tonywarderotica.com/bob-shell-in-praise-of-ecdysiasts/

Bob Shell: In Praise of Ecdysiasts

Portrait of Miko by Bob Shell, Copyright 2021

In Praise of Ecdysiasts

Because I spent more than thirty-five years photographing nudes, I appreciate people comfortable in their skin. Ecdysiasts are people, usually female but also male, who make their living taking off their clothing to music, strippers in common parlance, but also modern dancers.

I found my best photography models from among their ranks. It’s not that I specifically sought out strippers, that’s just how it turned out. In the pre-Internet days I found my models in two ways, advertisements in college newspapers, and word of mouth. I don’t remember how many times I’d have a model in my studio for a shoot, and after the photo session she’d say, “I have this friend…” I always told her to invite the friend in with her next time for a test. In several cases these friends turned out to be better models than the original woman. This was particularly the case with dancers, and dance students who tended to have other dancers/dance students for friends.

The other best models I found were naturists, commonly called nudists. There was a naturist camp near Richmond, Virginia, called ‘Whitetail Park’ where I must say all the tails I saw were nicely tanned, and I found a number of very good models. It may still be there, but I’ve been unable to travel since 2003. I also found a large nudist colony in Cologne, Germany, beside the Rhine River right across from the Koln Messe, the giant exhibition halls where international trade shows used to be held, and found models there when I was in Germany.

After the rise of the Internet, I found most models through my own website (bobshell.com) and sites like OneModelPlace and ModelMayhem.

The other way I found models was referrals from other photographers. My late friend Johnny Meeks of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, referred a number of very good models to me. Johnny was the original drummer for the Allman Brothers, whom he met while in art school in Sarasota, but turned from music to photography.

Now, before anyone calls me a sexist for concentrating on photographing women, I’ll say that I also photographed a few men, but I find the more rounded contours of the female body more attractive photographically.

I always paid my models well, even when I was first starting out and had little money myself. I also kept scrupulous records, keeping signed model releases in a file of everyone who ever modeled for me. After my arrest in 2003, the police had access to those releases, which have name, address, and Social Security number, and tried for more than four years to find anyone who’d ever modeled for me with anything negative to say about me. My models never felt exploited, and a number are friends today.

I’ve photographed nudes in Virginia, Illinois, Louisiana, California, Nevada, Maine, Florida, etc., and internationally in England, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan. In every case I honored whatever the local laws were, but the USA is the most restrictive, allowing me to only photograph women eighteen and older.

My career as a photographer was cut short by my conviction in 2007, based on testimony the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia says was, “Just wrong!” Once I’m out of here and free again, I plan to renew my career. I’m full of repressed ideas for photos.

Editor’s Note: If you like Bob Shell’s blog posts, you’re sure to like his new book, COSMIC DANCE by Bob Shell (ISBN: 9781799224747, $ 12.95 book, $ 5.99 eBook) available now on Amazon.com . The book, his 26th, is a collection of essays written over the last twelve years in prison, none published anywhere before. It is subtitled, “A biologist’s reflections on space, time, reality, evolution, and the nature of consciousness,” which describes it pretty well. You can read a sample section and reviews on Amazon.com.

Kenneth Taylor: Film is Definitely Back

Film is Definitely Back

Some say the return to film is a reaction to a world where everything has become digital, fast and easy. It is certainly true that shooting film requires you to slow down and this makes it a very enjoyable experience. Perhaps the reason is even more simple than that. The main reason for the resurgence of film may simply be because it’s beautiful. That’s what got me hooked.

At New York Camera & Video we’re seeing our film lab get filled with orders on a daily basis. It’s all types of orders too. Color, black & white disposable cameras, even slide film. We also sell film cameras and many don’t last on the shelves for more than a day. There’s also an increasing level of connoisseurship for it. Many customers know which cameras and lenses are of quality ore even collectible. They can speak in great detail about the differences between film stocks. This has a lot to do passion film seems to bring out in people and the vast amount of knowledge now available on the internet. We’re seeing customers of all ages. In fact, our older customers are shocked when I tell them our largest demographic of film shooters is roughly between the ages of 18-30.

Our film connoisseurs are a joy to speak with. However, the most enjoyable aspect of my job is helping someone who wants to get into film for the first time. They usually start out with something simple like a point and shoot camera. Within a few months after they’ve had some decent results they’re back in the store asking about trading up for a fully manual 35mm camera. Many even take it a step further and get into larger format film cameras. It’s thrilling to see their knowledge expand and the quality of their images progress over time. It’s not long until they’re coming in and giving us tips and pointers.

This isn’t just a fad like when fashion from a past decade briefly makes a comeback. The apps on our phones like Instagram have been trying to emulate film for years. The look of film never stopped being beautiful. Kodak and most of the other film manufacturers are doing so well that they’re figured out ways to resurrect discontinued films back to market.

More are on the horizon in the next year or so. That’s not a venture a company would take on for a fad. Even our professional digital photographers are beginning to add film to their wedding and portraiture packages. They tell us their customers are beginning to request it. Nothing beats the soft look of skin tones shot on film. We now have to process color film every single day to keep up with volume and we’re constantly getting new regular customers. If you’re interested in dusting off your old film camera and getting back into it or perhaps trying it for the first time, stop by our store. We have everything to get you started. A knowledgeable staff, cameras, hard-to-find batteries, developing, printing, even home processing materials.

About The Author: Kenneth Taylor is a professional photographer and employee of New York Camera & Video. To visit his website, click here: https://www.expoterrestrial.com

Editor’s Note: New York Camera & Video address: 1139 Street Road. Southampton, Pa. 18966. Phone: 215-357-6222

Bob Shell: Cosmic Dance

Cosmic Dance

The great writer John Steinbeck wrote, “To my certain knowledge, many people conceal experiences for fear of ridicule. How many people have heard or felt something that so outraged their sense of what should be that the whole thing was brushed quickly away, like dirt under a rug?” Steinbeck intuitively knew that the universe is far stranger than the average person realizes, as did Charles Fort before him, and that many strange events happen in this world of ours. They shouldn’t frighten informed people the way they would have in the past.

That fine Welsh writer Arthur Machen had an otherworldly experience that profoundly changed him, and incorporated that magic in his works, particularly in his last novel ‘The Green Round.’

But still, the average person today lives mentally in a Newtonian universe, while the reality is that the universe is strongly non-Newtonian. Our whole society is structured on an antiquated, Newtonian notion of how things work. Our sciences, aside from physics, operate on strongly Newtonian ideas, particularly medicine and biology. This is not just wrong, it is profoundly dangerous.

A person today may realize that solid matter is an illusion, hiding the quantum dance of uncertainty, at an intellectual level, but in day to day life treats ‘solid’ matter as something to knock up against. The eastern mystics long ago realized the truth, that what we perceive with our multiple senses is an illusion – Maya – not reality, and worked on ways to pierce the veil and perceive the cosmic dance as it really is.

Western science denied this truth until Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, Planck and others saw glimpses of the other, hidden reality, and laid the foundations of quantum mechanics, how the Universe really works. It is no accident that many of them looked to eastern mysticism for answers.

The door into this strange, wonderful, and sometimes frightening, reality was first opened for me by my old friend Robert Anton Wilson, in my opinion one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th Century. RAW, as I call him in shorthand, understood quantum reality in an intuitive, magical way, and incorporated that understanding in his writings. In a virtual way, he took my hand and led me through that door, approaching and reaching that brave new world through humor. As he said, “The music of the spheres contains a loony laugh.”

My little book COSMIC DANCE is, in many ways, a tribute to RAW, and my attempt to carry forward his work that was cut short by his untimely death.

I’ve done my best to live in the real world, the magical world of quantum physics, which seems so counterintuitive and illogical to our normal ways of thinking. But this is how things really work. Much of our advanced technology only works because quantum physics is the way the Universe works behind the veil. The quantum computers now being developed will change science in radical ways.

I firmly believe that human progress will depend on each of us coming to grips with quantum reality and changing our thought processes to admit the Magic of quantum reality. It’s fast approaching, whether we’re ready or not. Elon Musk and other advanced thinkers are warning us of the dire consequences of not being on board the quantum train.