The sound of your shuffling footsteps echoes off the damp walls of the dark alley as you walk back to your apartment on a dark, moonless night. Why did you even decide to live here, you ask yourself? The few streetlights that are actually still working flicker weakly, prepared to die out any minute. A cold wind blows down the brick alley, sending a slight shiver down your spine.
You reach your door and fish around in your pocket for the keys, grabbing them but dropping them before you get to the lock. As you reach down to pick them up, you realize you simply can’t. You’re completely frozen. A bright beam of light encompasses you and you notice you’re actually floating a bit farther from your keys every second. Reality sets in… this is it! You’re being abducted!
How would you react in this situation? What thoughts would race through your mind? New York-based photographer Josh Andrus explores these very questions in his new image series “The Taken.”
The Resistant
Josh and the team at Ruby Bird Studio were in talks with Hasselblad and Broncolor to create an event promoting some new photo gear as well as Josh’s new studio space in Brooklyn.
The series idea came to us late one night at the studio during a discussion on how to make the event a memorable and visceral experience. We jokingly considered using a spotlight as a tractor beam to randomly abduct members of the audience.
This wild idea spurred a conversation about how normal people would react to being abducted by aliens, and what their final thoughts would be. Conversation escalating, the team sketched out characters representing different types of people and how they might look in the first few seconds after abduction, several feet off the ground.
And just like that, a conceptual image series was born.
The Series, ‘The Taken’, was a fitting title and each individual image title reflects the character’s final thought in reality. While some are stricken with fear, others fight the pull of artificial gravity; another embraces this new adventure with eagerness and hope.
The Submissive
Armed with a new H6D 100MP medium format camera to shoot the project with (kindly provided by Jim Reed at Hassleblad), and grip and lighting provided by Schiempflug, the team at Ruby Bird Studio got to work producing a very memorable shoot.
The team had a 3-week production window and a lot to get done in that short time. They dove into set design and construction, logistics, hiring cast and crew, and even sourced a trampoline which would be essential for the project.
We thought about rigging a pulley system on the beams in the studio and suspending people, but I insisted on a trampoline. NOT a small kids or crossfit kind, I wanted a 10′ or a 12′ backyard trampoline – one that could support adults flipping around and turning themselves upside-down.
The Fearful
The production brief grew to a hefty 41 pages in little time. The portraits would be shot at the studio in Brooklyn over two days and the backplates would be shot separately on-location in the neighborhood surrounding the studio.
Though their planning was comprehensive, the lights almost went out on the production in the eleventh hour. Another production had moved into a nearby studio and rented the very last Broncolor Scoro pack in the city.
We had to scramble the night before pre-light to figure out a new plan to light the project and get the gear to do so – Our buddies at Scheimpflug came to our rescue with 5 Profoto 8a packs and heads, a Joleko 1600 and a monster fog machine so we could augment our lighting and not have two weeks of pre-production come to a screeching halt.
With everything in place, the shoot got underway. The stationery lighting setup was augmented with a handheld strobe piloted by an assistant to keep light on the subject as they bounced away.
The Distracted
The shoot itself had amazing energy – everyone brought their best self and we had a 2 day shoot in studio with pizza and techno and just so much fun. When you have such a strong team around you that you trust, you can focus on the details that make the difference between making something brilliant and just getting the job done.
Josh was glad that he didn’t compromise on finding an industrial-grade trampoline for the shoot, which provided exactly the right amount of “anti-gravity lift-off” for the images.
Photo shoots are all about the energy, and I look for the pulse of the room and I exploit it to get the shots I want. No pulley system was going to showcase the animated backstories I’d created for the actors.
Retouching the images took up the most time because everything had to be shot separately. Josh estimates that it took approximately ten hours of work per image to knit the backplate, light beam, subject, and floating objects together.
Josh has received an overwhelmingly positive response to the image series, and many requests to work on future projects with the Ruby Bird Studio team. He’s incredibly proud of his team and what they were able to accomplish by handling everything internally.
I believe since we’re so deep in the experience and lifestyle culture for content creation, a bit of hyper reality has been a breath of fresh air. We all just want to do something creative that we are also proud of.
Josh is running a seminar at B&H Photo with Hasselblad later this spring on the creation of the series.
Credits
Photographer: Josh Andrus
Sponsors: Jim Reed at Hasselblad, John Fishburn & John Engstrom at Scheimpflug
Production/Studio: Ruby Bird Studio
Producer/Digital Tech/Retoucher: Rebecca Handler
First Assistant: Kit Leuzarder
Second Assistant: Kiera Kussman
Production Assistants: Sam Tamborello, Marcus McDonald
Wardrobe/Props: Amy Auslander
Hair + Make-up: Kory Martinez