A Study.

Sculptors create drawings before they ever touch chisel to stone. Animators create extensive storyboards long before they begin the process of bringing things to life. So it is sometimes with photography.

All I had was time and a pair of shoes belonging to my wife. Eventually, this will be a much cleaner image, but it’ll need a person first. I was aiming for a kind of Gothic look reminiscent of the way that Frank Miller imagined backgrounds for Sin City and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. In both of those pieces, there’s a sort of despair that hangs over the city, a kind of shadow that at the same time seems like it’s relatively new, like it wasn’t always there, and is inescapable and suffocating.

I’ll eventually add a woman to go with the shoes. She’ll be smaller in the frame than I usually make people. I’m toying with the notion of putting someone else, or the hint of someone else, in the very near foreground, mostly obscured. Clearly the woman will be the focus of the image.

I’m thinking that I’ll try a variety of ideas to see which ones I think come off the best. I’d planned on making her defiant in the face of this nameless horror but the more I think about the way the image is situated, there’s also the possibility that she could just be running away, or in an even more evocative image, cowering in fear.

At any rate, this image is just a sketch. I took those shoes to a variety of other places and I think I can make the image work in more than just this venue. One of the fun things about film is that I’ll have to wait until I’ve done it and had the film processed before I can know how successful I’ll be.

Inspiration for images like this comes from interestingly disparate places.