Still Learning How To Crawl

Still Learning How To Crawl

What a piece of work is a man! - William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

Feral…that's the word I imparted to the model during this part of the session. I didn't know particularly what I would do with the poses generated, but that's nothing new. I did have some new footage of beaches, cities and ruins I wanted to use though, and as I often place models in poses on the ground like this, I shot these backgrounds with those angles in mind.

A few days past that shoot now, and I seem to be developing a bit of a series based on the image of the road as a metaphor, and a very flexible, time-honored metaphor it is. This one sprung from another one that may be a failure, with a man walking down the road which leads directly into the ocean. That one was to be something about walking from this world into another, such as death, oblivion, the unknown. It was okay, but didn't have much going on in it. Still, I liked the road running into the ocean, so I decided to pull those elements into and around this model shot.

Now I had an idea I quite liked - put a figure crawling on hands and knees out of the water and you conjure up all sorts of references - survivor of a wreck, injured, but for me, this was a man crawling out the primordial sea - a reference to the evolutionary path of man. The road is still valid here - a path out of the primordial sea into man's evolved future. But my idea, my twist on this concept, owns to the fact that the man in the shot is very much a modern man, and he is crawling out of the sea with a sprawling modern city in the distance.

There are times when I consider our period in history to be miraculously advanced with technological wonders all around us. We live longer, we know more, we travel faster than anyone who has come before us. In some ways, in most ways, we are living in a golden age of man.

But that is the view on the surface of things, in an overview or selective point of view based on the last two thousand years or so. In many ways we are still learning how to crawl, and have in fact crawled a very short distance form our savage past. Follow the news of the world and you can see some savagery every day. Observe the social interactions of some animals species and compare that to our own. We are not all that evolved after all, and despite the seemingly wondrous inventiveness of the human race, we are barely out of the savage jungle, the primordial sea. Religion and superstition still play too large a part in our conduct. War, torture and political manipulation still ensnare our daily lives.

Just before I called this image finished, I decided to add some sinister eye reflections onto my model. It's a little tongue in cheek, but I thought it served the concept that man is still primitive while dramatizing this piece into something approaching a frame from some graphic novel.

Model: Ben

A Before and After version of this image will be available on my Facebook page and my website:

www.facebook.com/MichaelBilottaPhotography
www.michaelbilotta.com