All images©Robert Herman
Robert Herman sent me these images from his project Goodbye to Frankie-A Movie in 24 Frames. Introducing the work he says:
"The announcement that Astroland was about to close, along with the hard rain brought when Hurricane Hanna made landfall, sparked an idea to use these circumstances and setting as a backdrop for a narrative.
A woman goes to Coney Island to grieve the end of a relationship. She's there to reflect and to experience her feelings of loss. The almost deserted landscape serves to amplify her emotions and put her in touch with them.
Working with the model, Laura Minchella, we fashioned a fictional character that resonated with her personal history. This allowed her to bring an intensity and depth to her performance. Coney Island, in a period of transformation, seemed an appropriate place to tell the story of a woman letting go of the past and perhaps glimpsing the start of something new."
Robert Herman was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Long Island. At the age of twelve, he began working as an usher in the chain of cinemas owned by his parents. Exposure to such a wide range of films during his formative years provided him with a unique vision: “Working for my father allowed me to view the same movie repeatedly,” he recalls, “until the story line began to recede and the images became independent of the narrative." Several years later, as a student at New York University Film School, Herman began crafting this vision by creating experimental narrative and documentary films. At this time he also started to include the study of still photography in his repertoire by cataloguing New York street life with his camera. As a production still photographer on independent feature films, Herman discovered the life at the periphery of film locations, which he found even more compelling than the actual film sets. In Herman’s bold use of light and composition, he effectively transforms everyday subject matter into vibrant, emotion-filled images. Herman’s photographs have been exhibited throughout the United States. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Telfair Museum in Savannah, GA, the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, as well as in many private collections. He is currently working on his Masters Professional Studies in Digital Photography at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.
