She Cried

This was the image that brought the conception of the book to be. I planned this shot in my mind dozens of times but during the shoot things would not go according to plan at all.

The model knew exactly what she was capable of though I doubted the level of empathy that she would bring to bear. We were out of time with only about 10 minutes left in studio time before we had to clear out. I suggested to the team that we should think about rescheduling and to my horror they overruled me and said let's push on. They both wanted to proceed and push things to get the actual shots that mattered.

In my mind I felt like they were crazy but I'm down for getting it in so why not try. As the makeup artist proceeded to make the moment look real the model said, "No, I got this". She told me to play something sad from the playlist. She wasn't feeling the first 2 songs and asked for something deeper so I went to my man Tyrese and the rest was history.

She kneeled down and you could begin to feel the music pulling out the pain of her life and the energy that came through was atomic. I was stunned and couldn't move, much less take pictures with a camera. I felt like it was an invasion of her privacy because the moment was completely real and I didn't want to injure it by stepping into her space. This is what the moment was about I told myself and finally coaxed myself into lifting the camera for a few shots that I wasn't sure would mount to anything.

Once we wrapped I realized that I was still in that moment. The energy that came out of it had saturated me and I couldn't shake the emotion so I turned to writing and what came out was She Cried. Once I wrote it I thought nothing of it. For a few days it stayed with me and I still could not shake the mood. I knew that I had to write again. I needed to write about something to express what was going on inside of me. It felt like in the moment of her kneeling there crying I was transformed and the emotion from it is still with me.

I started writing that day and have only stopped for brief moments in between being a parent and a provider. It's amazing how things can pass from one to another through the energy that we give off. We're all connected more than we know.