Shelter Me

Shelter Me

I am always pleased when a piece comes about not from plan or intent, but from happy accident. This simple piece is an example of the latter. With very little material to use at the moment, I went through my files of unused model shots from recent photo shoots and found this unusual pose from model Ed Barron, who improvised a series of poses (as he usually does). I was amazed at how surreal it looked on its own, with the legs completely obscured and tucked in. Once I added the background and sky in, I saw a similar shape in the cloud formations to his body, and once I added in the snail shell, one I shot awhile ago but never used, the shape of it also echoed the sky and Ed's pose. And that was it - a simple recurrence of shape that echoed the concept of shelter: for the snail which retracts into its shell, for the earth, and the shelter the sky provides all life, and for the man, well…

There was a certain sadness about his pose in this piece, in regards to the environment and the snail, that I quite liked. It was as if this man was homeless, lost or in need of protection, and it seems he is mimicking the snail, trying to create a sense of protection, of shelter. We humans have a need for the sense of home, the need for protection built into our DNA - we simple cannot exist without it. No matter our circumstance, we try to create a sense of home. The rune symbol on his arm is "algiz" which means "protection."

A Before and After version of this image is available on my Facebook page: www.facebook.com/MichaelBilottaPhotography

Model: Ed Barron