Harvest Everything You Can

Harvest Everything You Can

A strange image, and ultimately a rewarding one. It started, as usual, with no concept in place. I've been pretty vocal in my writing about this obsession with levitation trick photography, and how many people are doing it, but the one thing missing from most of them is the "why" of it - what is the point of it? What are you trying to say? But this did not start out as a levitation shot at all. Gilberto, the model in the shot, is very athletic, and he did a few jumping poses for me like this one, and it's amazing how rigid he was able to be while jumping. I turned this shot 90 degrees clockwise and I had a floating human - now what?

Usually I add a few things in, try some elements from other shots, and things start to click. Not here though. I wanted to use the corn again, as it is autumn now and it's my favorite season, so the corn layers were an early decision. At one point I added painful looking spikes spearing him from the corn, as if he were speared and skewered over the field, but it was a bit grisly, so no. Once I added the drill bits coming out of him, I liked the way it sort of mimicked the growth of the corn plants, so I erased the drill bit down to the tips, to what you see here. And the fact that my man was basically a human plant implied a connection, from earth to harvest, man, then man grows from himself his own crop, in this case, metal. I saw it as a progression of evolution, a theme of harvest and growth, the natural to the synthesized.

But there is one more theme floating around in this image, one more personal. The painful looking spikes growing out of the subject do have a parallel to the corn, and harvest is a rather violent time, from the point of view of the corn plant. The metaphor here applies to the human psychological condition as well: you are born (spring) and you grow and develop over time (summer) and just when you are at your prime, someone cuts you down to the quick (fall, the harvest). These violent harvests could be anything: a death in the family, depression, the loss of a job, and you must adapt and keep growing. A low period follows (winter), until you are strong enough to grow again, to stretch upwards and repair. Perhaps the next crop you develop is harder, tougher, but then these will be harder to cut down too.

I made all sorts of things to support this concept of a man being harvested - contraptions above, cables lifting him out, chains, but in the end, I let the logic of it go, and preferred the surrealism that the floating form gave me. Sometimes you need to let the image and the composition dictate to you where it wants to go and what is needed and what isn't.

Model: Gilberto Mendez