My favorite book/film these past few years has been No Country for Old Men. Though it can be a brutal read at times, it has become a light to me. I have really been wrestling over the state of the world and what it looks like to engage it (or not) in a healthy way, the tension of which has been exacerbated by being a father of two children. I find myself often feeling out of touch with the times and fatigued the incessant brutalities I see and read about. The more history books I read the more I learn that the things we are facing aren’t anything new. The world has always been a mix of terror and beauty, where growth and decay coexist. All this to say that in observing how Ed Tom (the small town sheriff in the book/film) engages with these themes and tries to figure out how to engage the brutality he encounters has been a way for me to process it myself.
This brings me to this shoot with Jim. Jim is one of my favorite people to collaborate with. Not only does he bring great poses and emotion to every shoot but his older age brings an element of wisdom and time to a shoot that it would otherwise lack. He becomes my surrogate older self during the session. Depending on how I direct or light or pose him I can explore my own feelings of terror, hope, fear, or acceptance. I think it’s also no coincidence that I am using such looooooong shutter speeds lately, exploring the passage of time in my images. This mix of both sharp and blurry or warm and cool also seems to encapsulate the polar nature of the world around us.
