Sheriffs
The seed for this personal project was a re-election poster for a Sheriff in the state of Idaho. Driving past I noticed that his portrait on the poster was just so bad.
That started me thinking about how it would be great to take portraits of Sheriffs, in their environments, with the feel of a classic Hollywood Western movie.
I wrote to every Sheriff in Oregan, Washington, Iowa and Idaho and initially had a very poor response. However, once I was shooting my first portrait, the Sheriff was so happy with it that he immediately phoned several of his fellow Sheriffs and told them that they had to let me take their portrait. The project took off from that point and once I realised how much I was spending on hire cars, I bought a truck for $3,600, which I still have to this day.
For each Sherrif, I scouted their local environment in the morning, trying to find what was particular to that state and then we photographed them in the afternoon.
Across all portraits the rim light was key, which meant for the portrait on the Columbus River, my assistant had the ‘sun’ key light on an extension pole whilst crouched out of sight in the boat.
Over 30 portraits later and a lot of miles, I still had a wait list.
