The Grand Canyon to Hawaii!
As I mentioned previously, the Loyola Chicago community is a vibrant global community and I wanted to fully represent this experience. That of course meant working with the Jesuits who were not from this province (each Jesuit belongs to a province around the world based on where they entered the Society) but it also meant expanding our locations.
A lot of times in hollywood you see movies and TV shows fake a location. Movie magic. And we did a fair bit of that, but there were two locations that were impossible to fake. Fr. Harry in the Grand Canyon and Fr. Jerry in Hawaii. A photograph that is 2 dimensions, that is not moving and typically does not have text on it means that you have very few opportunities to convey a message. In our case, the message we are conveying is the person itself. Trying to consolidate an entire human being into 1 photograph is impossible but that was our goal. So it was imperative for these two men in particular we put them in the setting that they love the most. That is inherently, intrinsically, and uniquely them.
Robert is one of my oldest friends and my closest work associate. But in almost every aspect of our lives we are completely opposite. And that ends up making us a great team even though we probably bicker like an old married couple.
Our trip to the grand canyon was less than glamorous. Being in LA, Robert and I drove out (about 9 hours) to our campsite where we met Fr. Harry. Who by the way is an expert hiker, and chronicles all of his hikes on his website harryhiker.com. Robert gets extremely car sick so he slept the majority of the ride up which meant I got to listen to my “crappy” Reggae music but at least I didn’t have to listen to his “crappy” music either.
Another A+ move on our end was to “rough it”. In other words, why would we pack a tent, sleeping bag, or even blankets? We also didn’t realize that May weather in LA still means theres snow in the Grand Canyon so our shorts didn’t quite cut it either. Good life lessons. We slept a good 3-4 hours in the car and woke up around 6am to hike in and shoot our portraits, which took about an hour and a half. I was admittedly a little tired driving out but a good slam on the breaks, swerve into on coming traffic because a herd of running elk ran into the road kept my adrenaline high for the long drive back.
Fr. Jerry, or how we know him as Pono, was another great and unique shoot. I might have considered going all the way to Hawaii to be logistically irresponsible but I was already going for a family reunion on a different island and Pono happened to be there during the same time. So we decided to make it a point to meet up and capture his portrait. If the secret is not out of the bag, this is the one photograph in the entire book that Robert was not present for, so we actually switched roles a little bit. He took on more of the creative direction and ideas behind the photograph and I executed the vision. I think we’ve gotten pretty good at each other’s job because we tell each other what to do so much.
There is such a unique thing when you experience a person who is home. Pono is one of my dearest friends in the entire community and I’ve been grateful to get to know him over the years but always in Chicago. My girlfriend and I met with him and spent the day around Honolulu before our shoot and it was an amazing experience to see him at home. Its almost indescribable but when another person is totally free and are invigorated with life, with their heart on fire, it is a very special thing to witness. And hopefully we were able to capture some of that wonder and mystery in his photograph.