Distant Era is proud to introduce our latest series, Gods and Heroes of the Aegean, which we will release gradually over the coming months.
Light in Darkness
It’s been a difficult year.
As things have fallen apart, there’s always an “at least.”
For me, that has been this personal project I photographed one year ago, in June 2023. Gods and Heroes of the Aegean is a series about Greek myth, and I’m releasing the first of the series next week, with the rest to follow as I’m able to complete them. Among the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, there’s been this project. Paradoxically, I haven’t been able to work on it much, and I’ve also spent countless hours on it.
What This Is
Gods and Heroes of the Aegean is a Distant Era personal series or “test series,” which means it wasn’t created for a client but rather it was self-directed—created by me and the artists working on the project, for me and the artists, to fulfill a creative inspiration and challenge myself to learn something new. Personal series help me learn new skills and services that I can offer to clients.
Examples of previous Distant Era series and what I’ve aimed to learn from them include:
– Urban Fantasy (2019): combining flash with ambient city lights at night.
– Portraits from a Distant Era (2019): creating classical-looking portraits using portraiture lighting.
– Hauntings from a Distant Era (2019): making a spooky series with basic compositing techniques, long exposures, and cinemagraphs.
– Chicago, November 2019 (2019): using contrasting gels with flash to create cyberpunk, Blade-Runner-inspired images.
– The Contract (2020): creating a simple narrative with images.
– The People of Light and Shadow (2021–22): revisiting classical portraiture with an emphasis on deliberate light and shadow areas.
A Compositing Project
If pre-pandemic Distant Era series introduced me to certain techniques, post-pandemic series further those techniques by exploring deeper levels and developing skills.
The specific skill I wanted to practice for Gods and Heroes of the Aegean was photo compositing, or collaging elements from photographs and other media in order to make something new. Compositing is relatively new for me, and I’m a slow learner. I make endless mistakes.
Hauntings from a Distant Era experimented with compositing elements in 2019, which we built on in Chicago, November 2019. If The People of Light and Shadow was the spiritual successor to Portraits from a Distant Era, improving portraiture skills over the years, Gods and Heroes of the Aegean is the spiritual successor to Hauntings from a Distant Era, incorporating dramatic story elements via composite.
Inspiration
The inspiration behind Gods and Heroes of the Aegean came at Christmas 2021, when I received Mythos, by Stephen Fry, my favorite telling of the Greek myths (alongside The Hippocrites’ twelve-hour play, All Our Tragic, in 2014). Reading the stories inspired me to photograph a series on Greek myth as soon as I finished The People of Light and Shadow.
From the first time I saw “The Accolade,” Edmund Blair Leighton has been my favorite Pre-Raphaelite painter, and a print of this painting has hung in my room over my work space for the last twenty years or so. The more of Leighton’s work I discovered, the more I admired his point of view and his skill. When I wanted to create fantastical and historical photographs, Leighton was my ultimate inspiration, though I had no notion how to accomplish this. Portraiture seemed a good place to begin, but I wanted to make something more ambitious and theatrical. I made rough strides toward my goal in Distant Era’s pre-pandemic series, but making the kind of dramatic images I dreamed of continued to elude me.
Finding the Way
At the end of the same Christmas holiday I received Mythos, I stumbled on Chris Koeppen’s An Aethereal Fire account on Instagram. Chris’s work was the closest expression of the kind of art I’d visualized, dreamed of, and aspired to do when I decided to start down this path in 2016, and it took my breath away. In 2022, Chris announced that he was offering mentorships, and in February 2023 I took him up on that offer and began my path toward making the work I’d always longed to do.
Prior to starting Gods and Heroes of the Aegean, I practiced the techniques Chris had taught me on an image of my friends Kein and Shelly that I’d taken prior to the mentorship.
The Project
I had hoped to photograph one or two people for an initial test, but schedules didn’t align in the winter of 2023. So rather than try to schedule a session with one or two people, I cast my net wider, announced a date for the series, assembled a creative team, and gathered resources for the shoot. I expected only half those I asked to show up, but everyone did. Instead of photographing one or two, I photographed fourteen.
The creative team for Gods and Heroes of the Aegean consisted of Jennifer Mohr and Erin Gallagher–our costumers–and Quinn Leary, our Greek myth specialist. Each were subjects in the series. I’ll introduce the other subjects as I complete their images. I’m extremely grateful for their talent and, most of all, their patience as I struggle to learn, while doing my very best for them.
A Herculean Labor, an Artistic Odyssey
The greatest challenge has been the work itself. It has been the most difficult work I have done in photography.
After a year and $5,000 in resources dedicated to the project, I’ve made one image. Client work has come first, always, and I’ve juggled several jobs in the meantime, between Distant Era photography, teaching and mentoring, book layout, and a writing commission.
I don’t come from a visual art background, and I had to learn so much to make the first image in the series. Six months ago, it finally looked ok. Then, in the winter, it looked all right. In the spring, it looked pretty good. I could’ve released it then, and I’d have been mostly happy. But the point of the personal/test series is to learn. I wanted to learn as much as I could from the first one in hopes that such learning would save time on the others.
Is it my favorite image I’ve done?
Yes.
It’s not perfect, but it is the best this average human can do now. And now it’s time to put it aside and try another. Hopefully the next one won’t take a year.
I must offer enormous thanks to Chris Koeppen, without whom this project would not be. Without Chris’s wise counsel and his kind and generous guidance, this work wouldn’t be possible. Without the hope of this project to keep me going, this year would have been intolerable. I cannot be grateful enough.
I’ll see you next week to introduce the first image in the new series.
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