Danielle with Snakes, Alligators, Guns and a Boat
Mostly American cities are very difficult for me to shoot in. They lack the history, the patina of age, and generally fail in their orientation to the sun and their lack of use of natural light.
New York, for example (my home town) loves to keep the light out. It tints its windows in order to control the atmosphere of what lies within, to avoid the entrance of too much light. Too much sunshine would definitely provide too much sun dreaming of what lies outside. The buildings want to avoid bringing the outside in. No opening doors or windows, no clear glass windows. Let’s seal it all up. Cook ’em and fry ’em until they are uniformly toasted, heated and cooked and cooled collectively with no loss of workflow. No nodding off for naps and dreams.
This for me is a fundamental problem. It is why I love England, France and much of Northern Europe. What the buildings are lacking in energy efficiency, they far make up for in scale, ambiance and beauty, and clean windows, scrubbed almost daily keep them sparkling.
What America lacks in their mostly uninteresting cities, it more than makes up for in it great outdoors, it’s endless plains, it’s vast fields of wheat, its oceans, it’s hills, etc., provide a magical and majestic landscape.
For years one place I have been especially attracted to, is the low country of South Carolina; that 200-mile extension of connecting islands that form the low country from Charleston to Savannah and slightly beyond.
I had been returning there for years. It is very old primordial, with endless horizons of marsh, and the verdant smell of low tides and rich productive soil.
The endless flow and rhythm of tides, the spared Colonial architecture and the rich patois of African, Creole and southern gentility mix into a truly fine breed of Americanism.
Some years ago, I was in Beaufort, South Carolina, as small coastal town between Charleston and Savannah, famous now mostly for it’s films, The Big Chill, The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, and Forest Gump. For me the attraction of the low country is also the weather. The winters are generally mild.
As I was scouting some days before the crew arrived, (in my usual fashion) in the 30-mile perimeter of town, we happened to pass this grove of Cyprus trees. Immediately it seemed so foreign and exotic, I knew I could make a picture here.
The location scout told us we were now on land owned by the lumber company, and he would find out if he could get permission to shoot on the property. A bigger concern was the snakes (water moccasins) and alligators that inhabited the low lying groves, filled with about 3 to 4 feet of water, just enough to hide an aggressive gator or an annoyed snake.
Now I love shooting pictures, but I do not relish being consumed, bitted or discharged by anything, and especially things so ugly.
As it turned out we easily got permission to shoot on the land, and a Ranger from the forest company kindly provided us with a small canoe and three men with small boats to protect us with guns if it turned out to be necessary.
They all felt it was too early in the spring and the gators would still be lethargic, but you never know. Thank God for a man and a good long rifle.
You must understand when I first saw this grove; it looked nothing like what you see in this picture. It was a tangled mass of trees with very little sense of being able to see through to the back of the grove. I looked and looked in the early morning of the shoot until I finally found this one small place where I could see past the tangles and be able to see what lay beyond.
Now the hardest part, we had to get some atmosphere into the background, which meant three assistants had to put on heavy-duty waders and wade through this dangerous, tangled muck to find their way into the background, out of sight. Thank God, most of them were boys of the earth, and they were willing to do this as long as a gun was close at hand.
It took some hours to get ready and then out of the location van came the beautiful Danielle, a very well known model, in her twenty-0ne thousand dollar, one of a kind evening dress that could not get the slightest bit dirty, wet or soiled. We had one hour with this dress, for at the strike of 5 pm, FedEx was making a special trip to our location to whip this dress off her body into a box and off to a show in Milan the next day. We had placed this canoe with two steel poles to stabilize it before she arrived. By boat we took her out and gently with two stylist assistants, lifted the bottom of the dress so as not to get a drop of this soiled water onto this one of a kind, slip of a dress that exposed from her upper thigh down her long, long sexy leg. I guess less must be more, for this dress could not have weighed more than a few ounces, to put a body and a long leg into this concoction and out goes women, lining up to buy one.
Just as we were beginning to shoot, as if on schedule, the sun poked out from a rather drab cold day, and within three minutes the picture you see was complete.
As usual I am not one to linger. We got the picture, there were no Polaroid’s, or digital flies to look at, just Danielle in her striking black dress in a world you know exists but is OH so hard to find.
