“Inquisitor, Overseer, Boss of the Gouged-Eye Gang, Goblin King of the Benighted Depths”
Near the end of the Urban Fantasy series, Nathan Pease proposed an idea for a skateboarding goblin, or so I recall. He said he’d just bought a goblin mask, and it sounded like a cool idea for an Urban Fantasy shoot, back when I intended for that to be an ongoing series. The Portraits from a Distant Era series launched the following month, so I invited Nathan and his wife Sara to be a part of that one. I wasn’t prepared for what showed up at the studio that day.
When he said he had a “goblin mask,” I envisioned one of the cheap latex masks of old. I was interested to shoot it and see what I could do. I thought if I was lucky I might be able to fix the problems in Photoshop and maybe get a half decent image. Maybe. I wasn’t expecting miracles, and I sure didn’t expect what came through my door on the day of the session.
The mask fit Nathan’s face perfectly, and he wore red contacts to go along with it. I admit I was a bit spellbound the first time I saw the goblin. I couldn’t believe how cool and realistic it looked. And what a fascinating addition to this portrait series.
Nathan’s no stranger to my lens. When he acted as the marketing coordinator for Idle Muse Theatre Company, Nathan brought me in to shoot press and archival shots for several productions; later, he modeled in costume for various theatrical events. But this was the first time we collaborated on a project where we were each doing our own creative endeavor—me making a portrait series, Nathan building a goblin costume around this character called Ghüs that he’d created, each of us personally fulfilled from the result. (The “inquisitor/overseer” tagline at the top was the caption I invented for the portrait in 2019 before I knew that there was a named character beyond the mask, so it doesn’t necessarily reflect who Ghüs the goblin is at all!)
I think of these Distant Era series like that old folktale “Stone Soup,” in which hungry travelers arrive at a village, and to convince the villagers to share, they fill a pot with water, put it over the fire, and drop a stone in it, telling the villagers they’re making a delicious soup that only lacks a garnish. The villagers all add something to the pot, and of course at the end they’ve come together to make something delicious. In a Distant Era series, I direct, organize, photograph, curate, and edit the project, but the more the subjects collaborate on the work, the better the result. I have been extremely fortunate to have unanimously wonderful collaborators on each and every project.
Editing and Revision
Nathan’s initial goblin mask had an incomplete chin, which I filled in when I edited the image. I shifted the background to green to match the goblin’s skin and create a complementary color scheme with the red in his costume. In the 2021 revision, I cleaned up a little texture and recovered some of the darkest areas in the photo.
Nathan brought Ghüs the goblin back for the 2020 series The Contract for our friend Hilary’s maternity session, where he shares some words about his character Ghüs and goblins in general. By this time, he’d upgraded the costume and mask significantly, but in that series we focused on obscuring the goblin in shadow to give him a more sinister presence.
Not to worry. Ghüs the goblin will peek from the shadows again with a whole new look in the not too distant future.
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