Denver Advertising and Editorial Photographer

I jumped on board to do a collaboration project with the Lowry Gallery about a month ago.  They paired 12 artists with 12 writers and called the show Poetic Synthesis.  I was assigned the only short story in the lot and I was the only photographer who participated.  It was a great project and I had a lot of fun deciding what to shoot and how to pull it off.  In the end, I decide to make two images about the loss of a young women’s hair.  The challenge was finding a location that looked like it might be a cross between a vacant lot and a trash dump.  I was driving down the road and I noticed that they drained Berkley Lake along I70.  There were a lot of treasure hunters out there tilling up the sand and the sludge trying to whatever they were looking for.  I’ll attach a few photos from my scout.  Upon seeing the landscape, I knew this was the place.

I shot the main image at dusk using two Canon speed lights.  One had a diffuser on it and was laying in the sand.  I needed a light that would mimic the fire.  I had another speedlight/umbrealla set up off to the right to light the family.  I was very lucky with having a great sunset and rim light.

Here are a few scouting photos, extra items that I shopped into the final image and the great story that I worked with…

Lviv, Ukraine 1999 by Rhonda Hattar

The apartment building is a perfect rectangle of concrete with grim old-fashioned windows.  Ours is five stories tall, the Soviet legal limit before an elevator was required.  We, of course, live on the fifth floor.  Each apartment has at least one balcony, but these are not for patio tables and barbeques.  Like most objects of Soviet design, they too are concrete boxes with utilitarian function.  Strings stretched across a balcony are for clothes drying, regardless of the season.  A corner of the balcony holds giant sackcloth bags of cabbage and potatoes

Hot water only runs for 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening.  I imagine a huge water heater somewhere under the city and lament the moment when a blue coverall clad worker turns a rusty valve that ends the warm water at 8 o’clock precisely.

Then, one day, there is simply no running water.  The first day, I am simply bemused, but as the days pass, I become forlorn and downright disturbed.  What is most frightening is the quiet acceptance of my hosts and neighbors.  Why aren’t there protests on the streets, why aren’t we marching to city hall?  Is there even a city hall?

Instead of outrage, we fill two buckets a day with water at a communal faucet on the street and haul them five stories up the stairs.  One bucket is for the kitchen, the other for the bathroom where we pour water from the bucket to “flush” it.  I am learning about plumbing, at least, though I hope I will never need this information again.

I have taken up the task of hauling the buckets, though my host mother tells me not to, to wait for the men.  She refers to some mysterious “female parts” that may be permanently strained by the labor.  But I am not so immune to the lack of water as they are, so I haul extra buckets to make up for my pathetic attempts to wash myself in the tub.

Despite my best efforts, by the second week my extravagant mass of dark curls is a tangled, greasy mess.  My host mother and sister have cropped hair that seems unfazed by the drought.  Under these desperate circumstances, they convince me to let their stylist cut my hair.

“Don’t worry, we make you superstar,” Lyudmila tells me in her awkward English that often includes obscure references to American pop culture.

I want to back out as soon as the “stylist” arrives at their apartment with his personal pair of scissors.  He is a grizzled old man, well into his 70s with a shock of full white hair.  Back home, stylists are perky girls with blue highlights, and even though they didn’t like it, they left my long tresses relatively intact after a haircut.  This guy seemed more like the cruel warden who shaves your head and douses you with lice powder on your first day in prison.  But in the confusion of language, how can I explain that there is more than a haircut at stake? This is the memory of salty strands wet and clinging to my back at the beach or the weight of a bun at the nape of my neck, where escaping tendrils invite imagined kisses.  This is about identity, maybe even about home.

He cuts it anyway.  My shorn hair touches my shoulders and a long coil lies at my feet, released.  I can’t look in the mirror.  I am worried that I too will be released, lost and unable to find my way back.

We sweep up the hair and carry it down to the collective trash heap out in a field.  We make a pile of dark hair and light a match.  The sulfurous smell burns our noses as the red-eyed pigeons pick through potato peels beside us.

“You have to burn your hair so that it will grow back and so that no one can find it and use it for bad magic,” Lyudmila explains to me.  Despite the stench and the rotting vegetables, we stay until there are only ashes.  The next day, the water turns on again, rushing through pipes suddenly and with no explanation.