CThru.com Presents Tony Ward

……I first noticed Todd on the streets of Philadelphia as he moved through the bustling city crowds with the assistance of a motor powered wheel chair. Todd and I met socially about two years later, at a body painting fetish party held at a nightclub in Old City that Todd frequented. I was fascinated by his strong sense of character and asked him if he would enjoy being photographed for the pages of Penthouse with one of my best models, Paulette Fallon. His grin was from ear to ear……… he loved the idea and said YES!
We scheduled a couple of meetings to discuss the series of photographs. A fetish shoot made sense, whereby Todd would play the role of a character who is submissive and Paulette would act as the dominant character. We agreed that she should play the role of a nurse, as they play a significant role in Todd’s life. The spontaneity of our thoughts, trust and friendship led to a most unusual series of pictures.

The Shave

Todd and Paulette were introduced the day of the shoot and couldn’t have gotten along any better. They truly embodied their roles in an improvisational play that was cast as a result of our chance meeting in a night club.
The dominant, loves to tease……….

Amanda

…….. The studio was contacted by the creative director for one of the largest gentleman’s clubs in the area, to produce a new regional advertising campaign. Five dancers who worked regularly at the club were hand picked by the CD to model for TW during the production. One of the models was a standout, a fashion thin blond by the name of “Amanda” .

Amanda Wearing Victoria's Secret

She is a twenty year old natural beauty who just recently entered the adult entertainment industry.

Tony Ward Studio

After the production for the club was complete, TW carefully reviewed Amanda’s photographs and realized she would be the perfect model for one of his ongoing book project’s entitled, Fashion/Fetish. He imagined her long slender legs in a pair of black fishnets supported by a five inch heel.
These are the first pictures ever published of Amanda and the first nudes she has ever allowed to be taken. It is our pleasure to introduce this lovely, personable beauty to our readers…..

Self Portrait With Nancy, 1974

…..It was a beautiful spring day in Lancaster County. I had just finished up classes for the day and called my girlfriend Nancy to see if she would take a drive with me to visit one of my professors at his house, to pick up a painting he gave to me for being such a good student. Gordon Wise headed the Art department at Millersville University, a small state teachers college tucked away, just outside the city limits of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His home was located in Mt Gretna, a beautiful area with rolling hills, lots of trees and plenty of farmland.

It took us about forty five minutes to drive from MSU campus to his place. Even if it had taken longer I wouldn’t have cared because I was driving my first car, a 1967 Camaro that I simply adored. When Nancy and I ascended the long hilly driveway, the first thing we noticed was the contemporary architecture of the home. There were enormous plate glass windows installed floor to ceiling along the first floor of the home so that Mr. Wise could enjoy the magnificent natural landscape that seduced him in to building his home in that area of Lancaster County. I stopped the car immediately and thought; wouldn’t this make an interesting picture? The glass became a mirror of our image.

We proceeded to get out of the vehicle to walk towards the front entrance. Nancy followed and then paused next to a tree to fix her dress. We were being playful in the car and she wanted to look perfectly respectable when I introduced her to the noted professor. I raised my camera to take a picture of our refection when she spontaneously hugged the tree pretending it was me………TW

Jackie Strain

……..It started off as a rather inauspicious day. I was just finishing up having breakfast with my mother at her home in Elkins Park. At 89 years of age she, can’t get around like she used to, so she has a nurses aide visit her at home to take care of some of her needs a few hours a week. Mother mentioned at breakfast that she was expecting a new aide in just a few minutes, and she wanted me to meet her.

Moments later as I was clearing the breakfast table, there was a knock at the door, enter a young attractive woman dressed in a nurses uniform ready to tend to mother’s needs. This is how I met Jackie Strain. Ms. Strain was aware that I am a photographer and mentioned with discretion that she moonlighted as a model in between her full time nursing job and was particularly interested in my work. Needless to say she didn’t mention any of this to mother.
She contacted the studio to arrange a meeting after work one day to discuss her modeling interests.
Nursing was fine, it paid the bills, but Jackie expressed a yearning for something more exciting in her young life. The thought of nude modeling exhilarated her and would be a way to release her hidden desire to celebrate and exhibit her youthful body.
She expressed immediate interest in working together, which resulted in the creation of a number of memorable pictures…….

TW

Post by Corey Armpriester

Amsterdam and Philly and Computerland

CA-Amsterdam seems just right for you on many levels; think about the Tulip and two lips being the vaginal lips. Have you ever thought about doing an erotic shoot in a field of Tulips or is that redundant?
TW- It’s actually a wonderful idea, I would be very compelled by something like that, and now that you gave me the idea, you may see that picture in the near future.

CA-Do you have a favorite Philadelphia artist?
TW-Hands down George Krause, he was one of my early mentors in the ’70s and after meeting him I invited him to Rochester to lecture when I was studying at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and he stayed as a guest in my home for a weekend which was unbelievable for a 24-year-old photography student. Even these days when I look at his work, it remains top shelf.

CA-Are you enthusiastic about art or photography?
TW-I feel enthusiastic about digital media, the internet, specifically blogs. I think that is where artists should move their work forward, by creating their own community around the work.

CA-I’ve been to your blog and it feels like an explosion of yes.
TW-I appreciate that because for the first time in several years I feel like my creativity has been invigorated. Whenever you go through personal struggles like a divorce or illness or death in the family, it’s very draining on the creative process. I’ve catapulted all of my energies into a daily commitment to the blog. I encourage any artist young or old, if you don’t have a blog or a website or email address to get those things so you can become part of the digital world.

CA-Is there any way of escaping that?
TW-No, it’s like if you need glasses. It’s part of the process now.

CA- You see it as an empowering tool?
TW-Absolutely, you become your own publisher.

CA-Empowerment through electronic media?
TW-One hundred percent. I’ll take it a step further; I think galleries as a vehicle to show work these days is passé.

CA-Really!
TW-Yes, the frontier for showing uninhibited work is on the internet.

CA-How do you balance reaching for the stars and accepting reality as it exist?
TW-There is no balance. The artist must have an unwavering commitment to what they believe in and must maintain this unique position.

CA-Do you mentor artists?
TW- I’m constantly mentoring artists.

CA-What is it about human sexuality that makes you seek it out and explore it? What happened in your childhood?
TW-It’s what happened when I studied art history. I saw a lot of great things–I saw great painting and great ancient art, great sculpture, and then I started to see a lot of photography and when I looked at all of that work I said, you know what’s lacking in this great canon of art that I studied? Where’s the human sexuality? That was lacking in my view of art history.

CA-Do you think it was cleverly disguised?
TW-It was disguised in allegorical paintings but hard core sexuality, which is part of human existence, was never seriously addressed.

CA-Does the name Pindar mean anything to you?
TW-No, I don’t know Pindar. What is it?

Tony And Tony

CA- You have a photograph on your website that is a portrait of you and Tony Ward (model/actor/artist) you’re both wearing sexy short shorts and slogan t-shirts that say “I am Tony Ward” (I am=God, esoteric symbol) and Tony Ward (model) is feeding you something that looks like a cigar and you’re blowing smoke out of your nose while the other Tony Ward is touching his penis. This trinity of symbols made me think of Pindar, the golden penis of the dragon/lizard that lives in the South of France. Are you familiar with this myth and legend?

TW-It’s interesting you bring up mythology and the esoteric; I have heard these kinds of connections to my work before. People may not know but I meditate twice a day. Who knows, maybe just a subliminal thing. On a practical side, the way that t-shirt came about was Helmut Newton’s former stylist Sascha Lilic saw my book Orgasm in a book store in Europe. He was creative director of Spoon magazine at the time and sent a message to his editor in New York to contact me about us working together. I thought he was looking for Tony Ward the model. So I contacted Sascha and suggested we do a shoot with Tony Ward. Tony Ward shoots Tony Ward (the model) and Sascha loved it. We met in LA to produce the shoot where Tony resides and that’s really how that photograph came about.

CA-You seem to be more and more involved in the world of celebrity. Is there anything about that world that frightens you?
TW-The more famous you are the less autonomy you have.

Actress Thandie Newton

Post by Corey Armpriester

CA-Can an artist be successful without an agent or gallery representation?
TW-That’s a problem with the art scene over the past 10 to 20 years. The galleries and the collectors became the power brokers in the art world instead of the artists and the artist almost became secondary to the art. You don’t need a big name gallery a big name museum or a big name collector verifying your importance; that is something you have to establish yourself and that is what will draw your audience, not the other way around.

CA-Why do you live in Philadelphia?
TW-This is where I was born and raised and I have family here and I’m a very family oriented person, Philly is home.

Family, assistants

CA-Do you think having a family hinders the artist in any way as far as resources and time that can be given to the work?
TW-No question, that was one of the hard things about my marriage and raising a family. It’s always an underlying drive, the work comes first. Any artist of merit will say the Art comes first.

CA-How does your family deal with that and what is the consequence?
TW-The consequence in my case is divorce. Unfortunately my 23 years of marriage to my wife Sandy has started to unravel through divorce proceedings. It’s an unfortunate circumstance.

CA-Do you ever allow the assistant to take the photograph?
TW-No, my assistants generally take care of my post production needs and they also help me on the actual shoot, but I never give them the responsibility of taking the shot and then me putting my name to it; that would never happen.

CA-Is there something unethical about that?
TW-No, Andy Warhol had the factory; it’s really up to the individual artist to decide.

CA-Do you practice sex magic?
TW-I’m not gonna get into my personal sex life.

CA-What? Tony Ward is afraid to talk about sex!?
TW-I’m not afraid to talk about sex. I think there’s a thing called love and I think there’s a thing called sex and the two are not necessarily the same; does that answer your question?
CA-Yes.

CA-Is the Muse necessary?
TW-The Muse is like having coffee in the morning.

CA-Is feminism contributing to the destruction of the family?
TW-No, I don’t think feminism is the thing that destroys families, there’s a lack of a long term commitment.
CA-People will be surprised that Tony Ward is coming to the defense of feminism; that’s very bizarre.
TW-I’m not committed to the idea of feminism. Who am I to say a feminist viewpoint is right or wrong. What I prefer to do is through my work ask more questions about a variety of cultural issues.

CA-Is photography stupid?
TW-Photography is simple, not stupid; even with all the cameras out there people still take very mundane pictures that don’t need to proliferate the planet. In the proper hands, it’s really a rewarding medium.

CA-Could you talk about light?
TW-There’s no such thing as good light or bad light

CA-Artificial and natural light are equal?
TW-There’s no mandate from the art gods indicating what type of light one should work with.

CA-Amsterdam is
TW-My second home.

CA-Do you have a favorite coffee shop and do you eat Space Cakes?
TW-No, no Space Cakes for me. I know too many Dutch friends that have carted Americans off to hospitals because of those space cakes.

CA-One Space Cake is not going to send you to the hospital.
TW-I know that Mick Jagger has been taken back to the hotel on occasion.

Part 3 of the interview will be posted tomorrow…..

……
Post by Corey Armpriester

With art, cigarettes and sex on my mind, I sit down with Philadelphia’s very own agent provocateur, photographer Tony Ward, for a little talk, revealing a man with drive and ambitions fueled by art and costing him his marriage. Art as home wrecker–I’m sure spouses of artists can understand such a thing.

The Philadelphia photographer’s work runs the gamut from high art to low, from gallery exhibits to Bob Guccione and Penthouse Magazine. Sitting across the table from Tony Ward, I get the impression he has the confidence of a man whose ancestors follow him around everywhere he goes, except during moments of silence, his eyes share a melancholy and introspection he tightly controls; I suspect this recipe is a powerful source of seduction (the emotional tease).

If you’re an artist and have ever fantasized about traveling and exhibiting your work in galleries around the world, selling your art for thousands of dollars and having it stored in international museum collections while working on your sixth book in-between, and working on a constant stream of magazine spreads, then Tony Ward is living out your dreams in his life. How did that happen? What does it take to get that far? He talks about art patronage, feminism, space cakes, Thandie Newton and agents re-emerging to assist him in making the right introductions. He gives both the carnage and inspiration of art life, yearning for itself.

Ward will be showing some of his work at The University of Pennsylvania’s Fox Gallery, Feb. 17 to March 5, 2010.
Corey Armpriester-Germany has been very good to you, what is your relationship to the German people?
Tony Ward-It’s so true that Germany was a spring board for me. What happened was my agent in New York was Henrietta Brackman; she came out of retirement to represent me. Henrietta introduced me to Ursula Kreis, another well known New York agent who introduced me to the right people at the right time, which resulted in my having shows in Hamburg, Berlin and other German cities.

CA-Are you surprised that your photograph titled, “The Figure” sold for $18,000?
TW-I wasn’t really that surprised, only because I think it’s one of my best works; a gallery in Paris decided to invest in a print that warrants that kind of price, and a collector I met at the opening bought the piece.

The patron

CA-How important was Bob Guccione to your career? (Guccione is founder and once publisher of Penthouse magazine).
TW-Bob Guccione was pivotal because during 1995, I was producing a lot of free work, work for myself, and I was getting into a very creative zone. A friend of mine that had worked along side of Bob in the ’80s suggested I send Bob a portfolio. I sent a set of prints to his house on 16 East 67th Street in NYC; after he saw those prints he decided to feature me in the September 1996 Anniversary Issue, 16 pages that launched my career in the adult print industry. He was my patron of the arts for almost 10 years; I had an open checkbook to produce as much material as he could publish for many years. That’s what enabled me to travel to Europe so much.

CA-Do you think the grain in your photographs distinguishes your work from pornography?
TW-There’s certainly artifice built into the structure of my work to try and avoid the stigma of being labeled a pornographer, because the facts are that I was engaged in these kinds of shoots really looking for a means to express the art of it not the sex of it.

CA-Do you think the grain gets in the way of using the images as a masturbatory aid?
TW-I never considered my images to be masturbatory at all. In fact someone came up to me once and said, “Tony I find your images masturbatory”; I was almost insulted or repulsed, that was the consequence of some of the work.

CA-Why is the strap-on so important?
TW-That was just a visual tool we used; it was one of the protocols, especially when shooting lesbian scenes.

CA-Using one word, describe the vagina.
TW-Flower

CA-Is branding your name a dehumanizing act?
TW-No, I think branding a name is important for survival. It’s a business decision that most artists make at some point in their career. At the end of the day, Art is a form of branding. I’m encouraging young artist to be more self-sufficient and brand themselves via the internet.

Part Two of the interview will be posted tomorrow……

It is hard to believe that a decade has passed since I published my first two books on erotic photography with the charming little bookstore, La Musardine located at 122 rue du chemin-Vert, Paris. Friends in the states informed me about the renowned French publisher, and its hardcore counterpart Alixe Editions. At the time, the late 90’s, I had found an outlet for publishing my most challenging erotic work under the creative direction of Penthouse founder and publisher, Bob Guccione. Many of the pictures that were originally photographed for Penthouse, were later published in my first two volumes Ogasm and OrgasmXL, under the editorial supervision of La Musardine owner Claude Bard and his insightful assistant and Anne Hautecoeur.

My first visit to meet Claude and Anne was a short walk from my apartment in Menilmontant, through the beautiful Pere Lachaise cemetery, were many notibles were laid to rest. A short distance to the unique erotic bookstore, La Musardine is mixed in with a variety of apartments, business’s and delicious French pastry shops, that are located along the busy Parisian street, If you don’t pay careful attention as you got close to the address, you could easily walk past it, as I have on many occasions. Once you enter the shop, hundreds of books lining the walls of the quaint environment overwhelm you. Erotic titles that you would never imagine would ever be published could be found in La Musardine’s extensive library. It was an education in itself, just looking around at all the literary works and photography books published on the subjects of sex and erotica. I knew at once that I found the right publisher for my vision and erotic imagination……..