RaMell Ross
Appearances
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Yeah, because while this time I'm making images, I'm teaching in the community. I'm working at an organization called Youth Build. And I'm also coaching at the high school basketball team. Coincidentally, I played basketball at Georgetown one year overseas. I was like the best basketball player in the area. And so that gives you just mad respect because people respected me fundamentally.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And then I'm working at this program that's helping. kids who are 16 to 24 who are dropped out either get back into school or get some workforce training. And I think when I moved to Hale County in the local school system, public school system, I think they had 70 seniors and I think 30 graduated.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I know everybody. Everybody's family. And that's my role. My role is not a photographer or an art maker. My role is a community facilitator or assistant to some degree. So when I decided to make a film, people still... thought that I was working at YouthBuild. And I would correct them, you know, like I actually left. I'm living in Rhode Island. I'm in grad school.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
But the foundation of my relationship to the community was not to be there to make images or films. And so no one cared that I was filming them because we had a relationship otherwise.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Mm hmm. It's funny because I think now people see me as an artist photographer, though sometimes people when I when I'm there, they still ask me if I can if I can get their kid into a program or, you know, how I can help the kid connect with a college. But a slight tangent, why I call the film Hell County this morning, this evening is because it's not Hell County. It's my Hill County.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And when people use the names of places, there's some sort of absolutism that I think is fundamentally attached to it, as if that's the experience for everyone else, when it isn't. And it's not their fault for using language like that. But I always think when someone... Someone should make things more personal.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I wrote this article for... the Huffington Post and added one of the photos that I don't show. And people, and the question was, yeah, what's it like in Hale County? What's it like in this place? And I spoke about it. And in the comment section, a couple people from Hale County were like, that's not Hale County. What I know to be Hale County is this.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And you said that this was the best restaurant, but this is the best restaurant. And this is this. And coincidentally, it was a white-black dynamic. I'm spending my time with the majority. Well, I'm spending all my time with black folks. They're spending almost all their time with white folks. They see Hale County as something else. I see Hale County as something else.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And that filtered into my image making. It's like, oh yes, of course, it's true. I did use the language in a way that totalized the place in my point of view. I need to be more specific. What is my Hale County? I need to say it's my Hale County. How do you make images that feel that specific?
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
How do you make images that feel that personal so that, again, you're not presenting the place as incorrect because it is actually your perspective and that's built into the reading of it?
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I'm so glad you're asking. That's so... Man, I forget that I did that.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I do. Well, it's not something... I thought about it every day leading up to it for about three years. But afterwards... In the same way that you skydive or you, you know, you swim in the Mariana Trench, you take that experience in and then now the anxiety is over. You have it in your body and in your brain and you kind of go forward.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Well, I love that you asked because that idea is where the boxcar imagery came from in Nickel Boys. Like, that's how I came up with that thought. Yeah.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Because I wondered, like, I mean, the box, it was built by myself and the design was led by this guy, Bobby Davis, who kind of runs my art studio in Rhode Island. And it's built out of Alabama Railroad ties, too, which is just really, really, really cool. You can't access it from the outside. You can only get out. Because, you know, we're relatively thoughtful dudes.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And the person whose truck I was on, it was a gooseneck trailer, open air. We got him from this website, YouShip. He didn't know I was in there.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Yeah, we told him that it was a kinetic sculpture.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Because, you know, lights would go on and off and there would maybe be some movements. And we know that he didn't know what kinetic meant. We don't even know what kinetic sculpture means. But, like, that mystery will allow him to, like, accept that... weird stuff is happening and don't call the police. But he didn't know I was in.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And so we were worried about if he got suspicious trying to open it. And of course, the liability of human trafficking, like all of these law problems that we can't even account for because we're just regular folks. But in that building of it and being inside of it for 59 hours, like it was supposed to be
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
36, 38 hours, but he wasn't as truthful as he could have been, and he had overdriven his hours, and he ended up stopping at a rest stop in Pennsylvania.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Well, I had a GoPro. I had, like... 80 batteries or something and I had enough SD cards and I had a timer on my watch and I had a light in there with a battery and every hour I would change the GoPro battery. And so I could record the whole thing. And that's kind of how I knew. I also have my phone, but I didn't use it
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
So, yeah, so I wondered over the course of it, like, if the door was open, like, how beautiful. If I could just, like, see the landscape from a boxcar. And, of course, it's great migration, you know, from that perspective. But the origin of the project is thinking about the reverse of Henry Box Brown, who shipped himself out of slavery in the mid-1800s.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And the idea that, you know, people of color and Black folks... need to or should or I'm encouraging them, as many people are, to go back to the South, to reverse migrate and to claim land and to sort of dilute.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Well, it's a very personal reason. I'm a very serious athlete, and I'm used to mind over matter and playing through pain and putting my body on the line for what I want to do, what I believe in. When I stopped playing sports, I lost that aspect of my physical relationship to things I cared about. And I think intellectual labor has its own version of that. But I'm not a person to go to protests.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I've been to them before, but it's not me. Whatever that means, it can be impact more. I think that doing performance art and doing work like this is my version of putting my body on the line in the way in which so many people go and are battered by police officers and or always at risk of being hit in the face by some pepper spray or some tear gas. Who knows what could happen? This is my version.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I never said this publicly. I loved it. I loved being in there.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I love that there was nothing else to do. I was just in there. What am I going to... What am I doing? What am I going to do? My only goal was to, like, survive or to... I mean, it's a bit dramatic because two people knew I was in there. I could get out whenever I wanted. Yeah. I'm not saying that this was anything like Henry Box Brown's. Yeah. Just a project with deep meaning to me. But...
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
My goal was to exist. And the sound, it sounded like I was time traveling because I sound like I was on a freight train. I thought the box was going to fall apart. It was loud. Yeah. Oh, my God. It was...
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
terrifyingly loud at times I can't see how it's strapped I know my guy Bobby Davis he's one of the smartest people I know I know that the box is built well I know it's strapped down because he would not he was hesitant to even do this thing I had to like almost force him but he's a big supporter of my work But also, I can't see it. So I think, so it's terrifying.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
It's calming because you have to submit. You're putting your hands in the life of someone else. But I think the reason why I liked it is simply because I just had to be.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Yeah, not so long, actually. I was born there, left, I think, within a year. My sister was also born there. And that was really influential, I think, in the way in which I viewed... The globe. The world. The world. Yeah.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Dream, man. A dream. I still dream about basketball. Daydream about it. Like, I still feel it. Like, so much muscle memory. Like, I am a trained basketball player. You know, you can imagine, like, a person that's a green parade. I was a trained killer.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
You know, really late, like I'm a late bloomer to all this stuff. Like I was just a relatively, you know, free floating child, really into math, honestly, and really into drawing until I found karate in like middle school and then basketball. I think my fresh about my freshman year of high school, high school, really late. I met one coach. whose name is Robert Barrow.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
He was, you know, arguably the most influential person in my life outside of my father, male at least. And he was like, you know, Ramel, You got it. And I'm, you know, I'm like 14 years old. I'm like, what is it? And he's like, you know, I played with Grant Hill and, you know, I played at college and I think you could go to the NBA. You're smart enough. You're athletic enough.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And I say enough because you're not like naturally talented in any of those things, but you have the bones essentially. If you do this and he like pulls out a sheet of paper and is like, if you do these workouts, You can go to the NBA. And I was like, all right, coach.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Oh, I remember. I remember well. First time I dislocated my shoulder was at a tournament in Las Vegas. It was before my senior year of high school. And I already committed to Georgetown. And I some guy was going up for a shot. And under the hoop, really big guy. And I swipe with my left arm and I'm really extended.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And the force of my palm hitting the ball, you know, ricochets through my arm and pops my shoulder out. Really painful. Throw my arm up, scream for my father. I think eventually my arm slid back into place. We didn't think much of it. You know, people get injured all the time. Turned out to be a reoccurring injury where I needed to have like kind of reconstructive surgery on my shoulder. Yeah.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
My sophomore year when I was ready to start and I was playing my best basketball, recovered from my left shoulder injury, and I broke my foot in the summer before my sophomore year. That's fine. I can deal with that. Got fixed, rehabbed, was ready to play, ready to start. And the first practice of that season, I break that same foot again. I break the screw out of it.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I knew it right when I rolled my ankle. And that's when I was like, oh, I might not go to the NBA. You know? Yeah, it's so... It's so visceral. Like, I remember it like I've never that was my first time being depressed, you know, hold myself up in my dorm, grew a beard for the first time and like didn't talk to anyone for like two weeks, which isn't a long time.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
But like the opposite of my personality at that time, at least.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Oh, yeah, I can't play now. I can play for like 15 or 20 minutes, but my foot still hurts. I ended up rehabbing back, ready to start. And then my junior year, same thing happened to my left shoulder, happens to my right shoulder. Rehab again. Then my senior year, same thing happens again to my right shoulder. And so it's always been a constant body failing me.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
relationship to basketball, my first love. Which, to tie back to filmmaking, is why, one, I care so much, and two, why I am not so concerned with the reception or the outcome. Because... first career is done. I've already had my biggest hopes and dreams squished. And the meaning that I got from basketball was replaced by photography and film.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And so not only do I care about it more than most things, I'm also used to, I've also gone to the extreme of hope and despair. And so this is all like second life to me, genuinely.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Yeah. It's okay. You know, I think it happens to everyone and it's never a good time. Yeah.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Yeah, it's a combination of... I don't think photography would have felt or filled the space or done what it did if I didn't lose basketball and my mom at the same time. I think if it was just either one of those, something else would have happened. That's probably with everything in everyone's life. It takes a combination of factors. I think...
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
There's something about, I want to say dangling the carrot, the way in which basketball is like... Every time you make a shot, it's perfect. You could be done, but you do it again. Because it's not about that one... moment of perfection. It's about perfection over time, or it's about the pursuit of it. It's something else.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
There's something about photography that is like that, in which you need to prove that you can do it again to yourself. You're chasing something. You're in pursuit. You're on some treadmill. It's and it's ineffable and you want to do it forever and you're never satisfied. And it's essentially not about the thing itself. It's doing something else for you. And. Yeah, I just need it.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I just needed that. You know, I needed what like what a big hole to to fill, you know, to first loves mom and and sports. I think maybe now for the first time I'm. understanding that it actually filled... This is what it did. It filled the role. It allowed me to see myself.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I'd never seen myself because I'd always been disciplined and basketball obsessed and so loved by my family and so privileged in all those ways. I never had to reflect on the composition of myself, the constitution of myself, what I believed. I didn't know what I believed.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Yeah, it's way easier than one might imagine. You basically don't have the character there and you have a camera operator that's sitting there as the character and then you shoot it from both scenes. So it's quite difficult for the actors because essentially their scene partner is a camera operator.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I didn't know what I believed until I started reading books because then you're engaged with the interior life of others in a way in which you can't always through conversation, especially when you're going through puberty or you're becoming a person. So I think it let me think about identity deeply while forming my identity.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And that's probably why I take it so seriously as a knowledge production of identity.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I think I was always curious. My dad and my mom, I think, encouraged that for my sister and I. I think once... I went to college is when I really started to think in a way in which was annoying for everyone in my family.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Because the deconstruction and picking apart was they were the targets. What do you have access to? Your mom, your dad, and your sister. Right. And their decisions. Yes, yes. They loved you. Yeah. They loved me, but they didn't want to talk to me, probably. Yeah. And then, of course, you get out of that mode of... I mean, I began to question everything.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And when I mean everything, I mean everything. I would go outside. I would read nutritional facts because, I mean, I felt undereducated. Like once you come into, once I came into my own, especially as an athlete at a school like Georgetown in which everyone's vocabulary is just like, I don't even know what they're talking about. I didn't know what indifferent meant.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I remember when I was walking and a friend was like, man, I'm indifferent to that. I was like, Indifferent. How do you get inside something that's opposite of something else?
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And of course, the character is standing behind or sitting behind the camera operator delivering their lines. But the other character who's looking down the lens is not allowed to look at them, of course. They're supposed to be engaged with the camera operator.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And so this offers, I think, an assurance that while you're encountering this image, you know that it's from a specific person's consciousness, an extension of their consciousness, one could say. And with that, it's a type of personal truth that I think one fundamentally connects to.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Yeah, I made this film, Hell County, this morning and this evening. Before this film, right?
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Yeah, yeah. And essentially, halfway through the process, I realized that I wanted to make the camera in Oregon because... There was something that maybe we'll get into, but that has to do with photo history and authorship and the production of Blackness.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I think to make the camera an organ is to acknowledge first that the camera is something that others are. And it's something that abstracts. It's something that produces sort of false positives.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
It's anthropological. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I think in terms of the way that photography and film present a truth that is perspectival but presents itself as unauthored often just by fact of it. not being clearly from someone's point of view has always been the problem.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Because from an anthropological perspective, when you go to a place and you make something from your point of view and you present it as science, it just reads as factual. And that's why we believe certain things about certain places. It replaces that perception. And so to make the camera an organ, to me, is a strategy to ensure that the person encountering the work
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Knows that it's author, that it's subjective.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Yeah, I think it's what wasn't on the page. I think reading Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys, my first thought is, like, what's the world look like then, you know?
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
In the 1960s. And I say that with, like, an armchair philosophical undertone in that I like to think about... We don't know what the world looked like specifically from our lens now. The world that we see is not the world that they felt. It's the world that we think we know from our future position. I look at that, I read the book and I'm like, What would I photograph then? What would I see?
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Like, what would I feel? A person who's grown up with the privileges that I have and leans towards a poetic exploration of the visual field and society. I think one of the challenges of the adaption is the adaption itself. You know? Like, how do you do that? And...
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
You want to take liberties that lean into your strengths, but you don't want to take liberties that undermine, at least from my perspective, because Coulson's work is rooted in truth, and it does have this mythology that is almost biblical in the way in which it's trying to get to the, through archetypes, it's trying to get to some sort of deeper fact. You don't want to stray too far.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
The idea of the images popping up is kind of how we're dealing... We deal with images, I think, in our own head. Like, when we see something, there's an association that happens. And it flexes or accents some sort of visual thing we've encountered in the past. It helps us read that thing. And then we're off to the races. But also, in the context of the film, I think it allows the viewer...
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
if they're open enough to it, if they're not taken out by that gesture to participate in an understanding of larger image production. And specifically in this film, in the production of blackness, right? If you're showing images that Jomo and Frey and I made, And it's from a black point of view. We're using a Sony Venice. It's 6K. It's poetic.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And then you're seeing these archival images from yesteryear that were taken from a completely different context. Who knows if the people that were in the images were even asked. 99%, I would say, of all images of all black people across the history of time have been made by white people.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And that's not necessarily a bad thing, made by white people, but we know the history of blackness and we know the transatlantic slave trade and we know how images were used then. And so we get to do something, I think, that is an almost impossible thing to practically do. And I think we can only conceptually do it, which is like thicken time. right?
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And it's like, it's an Aristotle phrase, like, how thick is time? You know? Thick is, yeah. Yeah. And how interesting, right, to be able to watch something and be engaged explicitly and emotionally in the history of that visual process.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
That's essentially the origin of all of my work because. I filmed Hell County this morning, this evening, the documentary in the South, of course, Alabama. I think I had about 1,300 hours of footage. You lived there for 12 years? Yeah, I still live there. I have a house and go back as much as possible and still film. I'm interested in a longitudinal relationship with image making and with people.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And so I basically spent... I felt like, to some degree, both Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, the two main characters in the film, that I was part of their family, like nuclear family. And then when you add a camera... you also get to see moments that no one else is there for, that only the nuclear family is there for.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And those are the moments that endear you so much to the person that when they do something horrible or they make some mistake where it's just like, You're not the sum of that. That's just one thing. I know you really well. And so how do we account for the fact that almost every image made by every other person that's been disseminated to represent them has never been those images?
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
It's government, news, reportage, street photography, always in the intent of someone else who has no family relationship to you. So you have to ask yourself, what if every image made by every other person across time had always been as if that person was your brother or sister. I think we would have a different relationship to humanity at large.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And I love your take a picture and it doesn't represent the thing entry point because everyone knows that. But if you... start to question why and you start to look for strategies to account for that, you get to a film, you will get to a film like this. You will get to Hell County this morning, this evening. It's just not settling for that and making that a mission.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Yeah, what a decision in hindsight. I moved there in 2009 and I was freelancing in D.C. and just I couldn't really afford to live. And my roommate had a connection to an organization called Project M, which is a design build organization. organization out of MICA that was doing workshops in Hale County, Alabama. And he was like, I'm going to go. Do you want to come?
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And so I there was an opportunity through chatting with folks to teach a two week photography course there. And so I go to teach photography and I'm like, whoa, this place is incredible.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Mostly the sense of time. You know, when you go to the historic South or any place that is storied in that way, that I like to say that. The iconography of the South is so spread out where you can have dreams and you can have more dreams and nightmares in between icons than you can in the city.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Because in the cities, especially because stuff is always refreshed and they're always doing renovations and there's so much money and so much people and it's so dense, you're always engaging with people.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
things and it's just way faster but in the south there's just these huge fields and then you have this church that was built in 1800 that's what you mean by the icons yeah then you have this huge field and then you have this weeping willow tree and so you're just like out in the middle of this expanse essentially a desert for metaphorical reasons and then you come to this thing that holds this meaning culturally and so like what a meaning making space that's why like time feels different there
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And it makes you question what time is, which is on everyone's mind, maybe has always been on everyone's mind, but there in which the architecture doesn't change. Then what else does not change?
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
Well, I think I went there and I'm like, I can photograph, I can get better. And I made photographs for quite literally three years. Non-stop, every day, spending all my money, large format photography, like rapacious image making of my students, of the landscape. Was your camera basically like your appendage? Oh, for sure.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
I had it in my hand almost all times, you know, when I was shooting with the DSLR. Otherwise, it was right in my backpack. I'm like always thinking photographically and looking cinemagraphically. And every image I made looked like someone else's image. For three years. No joke. And I don't show these images unless they're in some sort of artist talk, which I'm trying to talk about my process.
Fresh Air
'Nickel Boys' Director RaMell Ross Makes The Camera 'An Organ'
And that's when I realized that my imagination was curated. Because I'm trying so hard. And the images, I think the images were beautiful. And I know they were. People would tell me. But why do they feel like someone else's?