Returning to the July evenings of 2019, our third outing was on one of the hottest nights of the summer, with temperatures in the high nineties. The oppressive heat didn’t turn away the four subjects that came out to do the project that night. In order to be sensitive to how they might feel, I dressed in long pants, a long-sleeved button-up shirt, and a sports jacket, along with a heavy camera backpack, tripod, and stand. I wanted to be the first to feel the intensity of the heat and humidity and wrap the shoot if things became unbearable.
Cat Dughi and I had been friends for years, and I was honored and delighted to have her out for this first Distant Era series. Her concept was fairy who had gotten lost in the midnight city and was half drunk on artificial sugar.
Narrative has been a consistent goal of these series, though we have often stumbled upon it rather than planned it. In this first series, we found a tree behind glass and wanted to show the fairy reaching out to it. When we caught the fairy’s reflection in the glass, it conjured the idea of a lost self, a trapped green nature spirit. Later, we placed an open book in the branches of greenery we discovered by the river. Last of all, we visited a little rooftop garden high above the city streets. The tone of the story that came out of these images suggested yearning (I felt). Cat and I had discussed the fairy looking for her lost name, and there was another idea that came out in editing about the fairy being the moon’s daughter.
We didn’t shoot quite as much that night as planned: halfway to Navy Pier, where we had thought to shoot another scene, I was a river of sweat beneath the sports jacket, shirt, and long pants. After our final rooftop scene, we called it a night. I made mistakes on the second two nights shooting the Urban Fantasy series that I hadn’t made on the first outing with the urban sorceress character. Notably, I tried to get by without a tripod, and this meant I couldn’t get as much out of my camera as I had on that first night. But I like the fairy character that Cat created, and in spite of the heat it was fun to discover these images on our urban safari. In future series like Chicago: November 2019 and The Contract, the lessons learned from Urban Fantasy would carry over and inform the shooting and narrative style. Thanks a million to Cat for coming out to play on the hottest of nights in 2019 and being part of this process.
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