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GRAVEYARD SPIRITS Graveyard Spirits almost got Robert Kawika Sheer arrested. A police cruiser entered the cemetery around midnight, -- its headlights striking Sheer dressed up as a gravedigger. A deep voice shouted, "Sir, drop the shovel and place your hands on your head!" Sheer unclenched the shovel and slowly placed his palms on top of his top hat The two cops cautiously approached, -- each with a flash light and fingers touching their gun holsters. "I remember thinking that I didn't want to go to jail; then, suddenly it became: Whoa, I don't want to get shot." Sheer laughs about it now and adds, "Imagine the irony in the news headline: GRAVEDIGGER SHOT DEAD IN GRAVEYARD." Sheer survived the situation and was able to continue shooting by explaining to the officers his strange but true purpose in the graveyard and persuading them to follow him through the darkness to the location of his camera. "Before finding the camera," states Sheer, "it looked like it was either jail or the insane asylum." What follows is his strange but true purpose in Santa Monica's Woodlawn Cemetery. Graveyard Spirits is an 80 minute single exposure photograph taken between midnight and 1:20am at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica. No PhotoShop. No multiple exposures. The performance of this photograph is a completely solo endeavor. During the night exposure, Sheer walks into the frame of his shot to create all the figures using a portable lighting device held in his hand. For each figure, he changes into a costume, travels into the frame, strikes a pose, and quickly creates a circle of light on the wall of a tombstone located behind him. It takes about 40 minutes to create all the characters in front of the tombstones. Then another 40 minutes is spent sitting next to the camera allowing the moonlight to continue brightening the scene to make the graveyard visible. Sheer's photographs are often called theatrical undertakings and this is his finest example, -- involving many costume changes and well-practiced choreography; in fact, he often refers to the frame of his shots as the 'proscenium' and the ground within the frame as 'the stage'. The performance of this photograph is one of nine separate attempts at creating this shot over a three night period. On the first night, Sheer had only one character to experiment with -- the Dickensian gravedigger. It was on this first night that the Santa Monica police surprised the artist. The police also made an appearance on the third night inadvertently pointing their car's headlights into the lens of the camera and ruining the seventh overall attempt forty minutes into the performance. Despite this setback, the third night was to be the magical night. The very next exposure produced the above image. "Everything came together perfectly, and the addition of the widow character on the third evening provided the spiritual female balance that the composition required", remembers Sheer. Not being able to immediately view his success, he performed a ninth exposure from 1:40 till 3am.
Perhaps Sheer's highest compliment regarding this piece came from his
cinematography peers who refer to Graveyard Spirits as an hour and twenty
minute-long "motion picture haiku" captured on a single frame of film. If
Sheer is creating one-frame motion pictures, then not only is he creating
the shortest films ever made, but also the
most inexpensive ones. To learn more about the technique, click here. |
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To order call (888) 371-4955 or e-mail Robert@SheerEntertainment.com
Robert Sheer
Copyright © 2000 Sheer Entertainment. All rights reserved.
Revised: December 01, 2008
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