Volume 2, Issue 17 AUGUST 3 -AUGUST 16

Richard Peterson lives in a forest house atop Indian Hill of the kind that most of us only dream about. Not because it's large, although it is, or because it has great views, although it does. Instead, it lures the visitor with art, history, and the juxtaposition of unusual colors and shapes, the wooden statues, the Moroccan lamps, the red walls and the massive, almost-medieval furniture, the sense that you are walking into alien comfort.

Kind of like Richard's photography.

Richard Peterson, a San Francisco punk-rock icon who took pictures of such bands as Devo, The Sex Pistols, and Iggy Pop, now resides in Colorado at the end of a treacherous dirt road. He's still a photographer, although his work is more diverse now. You can see it in the reprints of the ‘70's punk magazine Search and Destroy, in Business 2.0, in the new Devo CD, and at his Web sites www.richard-petersonphoto.com and www.pinkand-pearl.com.

Richard has also had some uniquely Colorado coups, like shooting the Boulder scenes for Stephen King's The Stand. With a glimmer of punk disdain, Richard chuckles about the incident: I'd hired a specialist, since I didn't know how to use a movie camera, but it turned out that I rented a camera that she didn't know how to use. So there I was shooting this expensive movie with a camera neither of us knew how to use.

When he's working for himself, Richard prefers to work with a much simpler machine: the Mamiya 7, a medium-format camera designed primarily to have perfect lenses. The camera's simplicity allows him to focus on the creative process, and avoid making his photos too contrived. Unafraid to waste film, he'll snap random shots during a photo shoot without looking, play with combinations of natural and studio light, and experiment with his shots in the darkroom or with the computer.

Pink and Pearl, the most complete site, features a collection of female nudes. The work spans four galleries. A special gallery depicts actress Shawnee Smith on a Smurf-like birdbath in Richard's yard. The first regular gallery presents a series of almost mythic women, dreamlike, draped in cloth and surrounded by light effects or patterned backgrounds. The second, more stark, contains a series of black-and-white photos of women with arresting faces, challenging the camera or turned provocatively away. The third gallery includes a series of women in color some of it draping them into distorted and powerful figures, and some just highlighting really nice bodies.

These galleries highlight the fine line an art photographer must walk these days when capturing the female form. There's a fine line between fine art nudes and porn, but people know that line intuitively, Richard said at his house.

Still, he says, he isn't afraid to play with that boundary Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, he said. I try to present things differently, sometimes get racier while still keeping that spiritual edge. On his site the pitfalls of that approach come to the surface; a dark-shrouded woman peering out from a series of entrapping, brilliant frames shares space with a serene blonde woman removing her panties. As in many shots of women, it seems harder to veer away from the pornographic edge while working in color.

I'm always trying to push nudes into a new dimension, Richard said. It's hard; there's a huge body of work. I'm always watching for those moments between moments, trying to remember things and capture them elusive moments, magic places.

Surrealism acts as a heavy influence on his work, starting back in his San Francisco days and nudging him in the present.

He came to San Francisco after he left his ‘60's job at radio station KCQB in San Diego, shooting the likes of Diana Ross and Buffalo Springfield, he moved around California before settling in Berkeley. He met up with the editors of Search and Destroy at the City Lights bookstore. Allen Ginsberg and similar luminaries funded the magazine, and Richard soon found himself in a venue where surrealism dominated conversation and art.

Ricky Trance (the ‘Head Telepather' of S&D) was a big influence, and all of those people there taught me so much, said Richard. They had masked balls where everyone would dress as a beast of the unconscious. They'd have unveilings, candlelight, shrunken heads the world was like a dream.

According to Richard, women played a key role in the development of Surrealism, acting as both muses and, in the case of women like Lenore Carrington and Deborah Valentine, as artists. Richard feels that, Women radiate this energy that's tied into magical places and surrealism.

But today Deborah Valentine is a famous tattoo artist, and Richard himself does some freelance fashion photography. The scene is older, and the punk surrealist movement is scattered. It's probably better this way. Then there were dogmatic meetings, a club atmosphere … all these people are still doing great things, but it's more individual.

Richard's own lifestyle testifies to that possibility. He is married and has children but when you look at the house his wife Sydney designed and the work they both do today, the reality of maturation replaces the specter of selling out. You can see the same thoughtful eye in his recent portrait of a CEO that you can in his 1978 portrait of David Byrne: both subjects look thoughtful, and the camera positions them in ways that predict their fate. Byrne, slight and relaxed, looks engaged and at home in his surroundings, while the CEO grins brightly, overshadowed by a huge roof. He was dismissed shortly after Richard shot him.

Richad Peterson's famous portrait of Iggy Pop Peterson tries to capture the same spontaneity of spirit in his nude portraits.