For the month of July I am offering $20 prints of my photograph entitled UNCLE SAM.
This image was meant to be a kind of murder mystery, a crime scene where the police have discovered the dead body of Uncle Sam in the woods. Who killed America?
I wrote the concept for this image during George W.’s first term as president. Given our current economic crisis, this image still strikes me as strangely relevant.
Uncle Sam was played by my brother-in-law Tom Beggs, who also played the monster in FACE. The police are made up of different friends. One of the officers is my frequent cohort Jason Coale. The detective collecting evidence is Ry Brown, a local filmmaker. The lead detective in the trench coat is actually my accountant Bryson Roberts.
We shot this image in a thatch of woods that Tom uses for deer hunting. My best friend and fellow photographer Kevin Sisemore helped me carry a heavy generator into the woods so that I could set up my strobe lights and fog machine. Almost as soon as we had everything set up it started to rain. As a result, this was an extremely short photo shoot. I had shot maybe 10 frames before being forced into a hasty retreat.
