This week on The All Worlds Traveller, we feature legendary storyteller and magician Joshua Safford in his persona as Jeremiah Wiggins, human ambassador to the faeries.
I first met Jeremiah Wiggins and Joshua Safford in 1994 when we were performers at the Ohio Renaissance Festival. An epic tale follows. Suffice it to say, I could not have known then that I’d move to Chicago three years later and rent a room in Josh’s Rogers Park apartment for the next fourteen years.
Photography
Joshua wanted some new portraits of his character Jeremiah Wiggins. His costume had vastly changed since the last time he had the character formally photographed in studio, and Joshua wanted to show Wiggins as he is today.
In our initial discussion, Joshua and I talked about the character of Jeremiah Wiggins and what we wanted to convey. Joshua described Jeremiah as a character of mysterious whimsy:
The magic of Wiggins is whimsical, but you don’t necessarily trust him. He’s not tricking you per se, but he’s revealing a magical world. He’s a politician for the faeries, which is another reason you might not trust him. He’s leading people on a whimsical, mysterious journey.
Joshua Safford on the magic of Jeremiah Wiggins
The Cart
Joshua and I had talked about photographing Wiggins’s mushroom cart, which he uses as a traveling magic table and gateway to the faerie world. This kind of image would work to promote Joshua’s act and the props it features. In our discussion, Joshua noted that Jeremiah Wiggins has a roguish and shadowy side, but not necessarily dark. I decided therefore to start the session on a black background large enough to accommodate the cart.
The black background is simple. Black isolates the subject in space and calls attention to the subject. The cart images we made are the most direct. They feature the broadest lighting, showing Jeremiah and his cart just as they are. We cropped the composition square, to fill the frame with the main features of interest—Joshua’s face, mushroom, and signs. We made sure to keep our aperture small enough that all the text could be discerned.
The Magician
One of Joshua’s primary portrait picks came from the black background setup. In this one, Wiggins balances, offers, withdraws, and continues to juggle a crystal orb. In the edit for this portrait, I wanted to emphasize Wiggins the magician, so I gave the orb a shine and the overall portrait a warm haze, as if Wiggins emerges in the dawn from the twilight of Faerie, offering a magical bauble. Joshua went to the Ringling Brothers Clown College; he’s always done magic; the walls of his place where I lived for nearly a decade and a half are covered with old magic posters. I wanted to give him a portrait that hinted at the magical, the fantastical, the unreal.
I lit our next sequence in a portraiture style similar to what I’ve done with other fantastical portraiture—a beauty dish for the main light and a large umbrella filling the shadows. I chose a brown painterly background for this, as it complemented Joshua’s green costume, while its warmer tones coordinated with the costume’s yellow-and-orange butterflies. When we photographed these, we felt we’d hit our look.
Finding the Look
Sometimes I’ll hit a look I’m happy with at the start of the session. But the light and colors used don’t work the same for every subject, and sometimes we have to adjust until we find what works. This isn’t true for passport and driver’s license photos, which use the same flat straight-on look every time, which is one of the many reasons we dislike those. In Joshua’s session, the black background worked for some shots but not for others; the warm background worked ok with our light setup from the black background but worked exceptionally well with restricted light and partly filled shadows. As usual, we shoot until we hit what we’re happy with, experimenting and playing to find what that is. When we nail the shot, that’s how we know we’re done.
It was a privilege and an honor to make these portraits for my old friend and decades-long roommate. I’d like you to seek him out at your local Renaissance festival this season and tell him how awesome he is.
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