It’s a fantasy we’ve all had at some point. We imagine ourselves standing on the edge of a building, overlooking the city, hair blowing in the wind.
As we get older, we stop dreaming. We stop believing that anything is possible because we’ve seen too much of what isn’t. And that is why I wanted to photograph ordinary people as superheroes — so that they could see themselves as they had once dreamed.
I wanted to capture the fearlessness of superheroes – without a green screen or cheap special effects. The simplest way to make that happen was to place them on the edge of certain death.
I chose a group of everyday people for this photoshoot. These weren’t professional stuntmen. Just dads, engineers, and customer service people. To do this shoot, they would have to face their fear of heights — a primal fear built into people. To be up on that ledge is absolutely terrifying. The wind is blowing so hard you think it’s going to knock you over. Every cell in your body is screaming at you to go back to safety.
My job was to convince them to inch closer and closer to the opposite direction of safety — straight towards the edge of a 1000 foot drop. In the photo, it makes all the difference. Seeing them challenge themselves and finding courage where they thought there was none was absolutely inspiring.
It is not the lack of fear that makes a superhero a hero, but what they do in the face of fear that makes all the difference. To get the vertigo-inducing angle we were looking for, we rigged a heavy-duty triple riser steel boom stand with a Nikon D800E equipped with a 14-24mm and controlled the camera wirelessly from the laptop using a nifty little device called the CamRanger.
When do you actually get to see the everyday person get to be a superhero? It’s a reminder that all of us, you and I, have it within ourselves to be whoever we want to be.
Credits
Photographer & Creative Director: Benjamin Von Wong
Producer: SmugMug
Cinematography: Chris MacAskill, Michael Bonocore
Editing: Anton Lorimer
Makeup Artist: Sandra Leathley
Superheroes: Don MacAskill, Kerry Ellis, Stephanie Drazic, Kaydin Carlson, Vilen Rodeski, Alex Zielinski
Digital Tech: Jessika Chiasson
Special thanks to Tamara DeJong for finding us the rooftop and to John Hancock Real Estate for location assistance
Editorial Advisor: Karen X. Cheng
