I explore banal and mundane activities - mowing lawns, serving dinner, fishing - using highly cinematic methods. Each individual image is meticulously composed, elevating ordinary subjects into iconic status. These are deliberate and artificially elaborate environments - the characters are carefully cast, stylized and lit, and the landscape around them is carefully constructed (you'll see fog machines, elaborate sets and props, and at least one fake ham). The resulting scene is from an alternate universe. It is very similar to ours, but slightly surreal, grotesque, beautiful and darkly funny. The characters communicate very real emotions; they are variously obsessed, isolated, frantic, preening, proud, confused, and desperate for acceptance.
Hunting is part of a larger series I've been working on of preposterously iconic images of people doing mundane things. Both of these photographs -
Hunting and
Fishing - were shot on a farm about 150 km north of Toronto, on an alarmingly cold day in May. It actually snowed while we were shooting, which was especially fun when I was waist deep in pond water. However, it did lend a certain sense of stillness to the set. That, along with the fog machines operated by my assistants, cemented the atmosphere of the iconic great outdoors.
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