A few months ago, I had set out to strip myself of the technical crutches I had been wobbling on for the past year. It seemed that scenes I tried to create were always over-stylized and production-heavy. It's not that the images were bad images. They just didn't sit in the real world.
With this new project, I set out to give myself some ground rules. I would use real locations, real people, in somewhat real situations. I would try to use the individuals own wardrobe and minimal make-up. I would use simple props, simple compositions, and available light with a subtle flash if necessary to bring your eye to the subject. The project initially revolved around the concept of "draught". A feeling people have when they pause and ask themselves, "How did I get to this point in my life?"
The first idea for an image in this series came to me when I was walking my dog. Every day I would walk by a neighbors house who had stopped watering his lawn. The lawn was the deadest section of controlled greenery I had ever seen. It was the most muted brown grass, the furthest from life before it disintegrated. At the time, I had noticed a trend in people giving up their yards for more practical, native landscaping.
The first thing to do was to ask the owner of the house, who I had never spoken to, for permission to use his yard. It took me a while to get the courage up to confront the man. It is for some reason scary to confront people you live in proximity to, probably because you are eventually going to bump into them again. When I finally got the courage up to knock on the door, I asked the man about the state of his lawn. He responded to me as if he thought I was some kind of landscaper looking for business and told me he was satisfied with his gardner. When I told him what I wanted to do, I don't think he knew how to respond. He agreed because he didn't have a good enough reason to say "no!".
So now having permission, I had to figure out how I wanted to light it. I had noticed on one of my walks very early in the morning that the early morning light was warm, created mood, and didn't create any shadows the first hour after it rose. So I knew it had to be 7AM. Next I had to find a subject who had the right character, a tired look about him, and someone who could portray an expression of "draught". My neighbor was perfect because besides having all these qualities, he also lived close enough to get him there on time. I spoke with him and tried to make plans, but he left for work early and gave me a very narrow window to shoot in.
We planned for the following week. Unfortunately, the weather for the following week was not cooperating. What was even more unfortunate, was that the owner of the house told me when he agreed, that the lawn was going to be torn out that saturday. I wasn't sure I believed him because of his reluctance to let me shoot my project. So I woke up every morning that week to look at the weather as the sun rose and kept the neighbor on call. Every morning I woke up to cloudy skies. There was one morning, there was sun, but I missed my neighbor as he left for work.
Finally it was the "now or never" point. It was the following saturday and the light was perfect. It was the day the lawn was to be taken up. I ran up to grab my neighbor and got my camera equipment. We got him dressed, stumbled over to the location and waited for the light. People walking their dogs looked curiously at us standing on the dead lawn. I didn't see a gardner in sight, so I was sure the owner was just trying to keep me from wanting to shoot in front of his house. At one point I saw him pull away in his car not to happy to see me. The light came in and it was perfect. I got my subject into place. I began by shooting the setup I was sure I wanted. I tried different things and staged any way I could think of with subtle variations. The light was moving fast. When I thought I had enough, I packed up and let the neighbor go back to bed. Shooting all film, I hoped it turned out as well as it looked in the camera.
An hour after the shoot I took my dog around the neighborhood on his morning walk. On my way home, I passed by the house with the dead lawn. As I walked by I noticed a couple of gardners pulling some heavy equipment out of their truck. I confronted one of them and asked, "You guys here to tear out the lawn?". The man looked to me and nodded. The next day there was nothing left but tilled dirt.
It final frame wasn't the one I was sure was the image. It was from one of the variations I decided to try to take a chance on. The photograph, I feel, was a success. Not just from my pre-planning and pre-visualiztion. But because I kept it flexible and was fortunate that on that saturday, the universe decided it wanted to cooperate.
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