I’m a full-on no holds barred daydreamer. I’ve always been that way. When I was a child, my teachers hated my daydreaming. As an adult I have the luxury of embracing it. So that’s what I do.
More and more as I travel down this photographing people journey, I’ve taken to letting my mental dalliances – daydreaming if you will – just run. In fact I think it’s probably the main motivating factor when it comes to making a photo. It seems that if I just succumb to the urge to do a photoshoot without first planning exactly what my goal is, the experience nearly always becomes at least a little disappointing. Usually a lot.
Indeed, sometimes no plan is the plan. I love jumping into my truck with a model and a couple of suitcases full of wardrobe and just cruising somewhere taking photos with no set plan. That is actually the plan. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s not really if you think about it.
Tribal Europe
A few months ago I went down a rabbit hole of pondering the fact that every human civilization has a tribal background and beginning. That led me to wondering what the earliest European peoples would have been like. I’m talking about some of the earliest people, the hunter-gatherers and the tribal people of early Europe.
The entry and movement of the earliest human arrivals into Europe is a fairly complex topic, but a lot of understanding has come about recently through genetic analysis. One fairly well accepted understanding is that hunter-gatherers arrived into Anatolia, which is modern day Turkey around 13,000 BC. At least evidence of a population of hunter-gathers can be found dating to around that time.
Keep in mind that human populations migrated into the area much earlier. But I’m settling on this era of Anatolian Hunter-Gatherers as the starting point of my daydream.
From here, my daydream really started going off of the rails. I remembered the movie, Highlander from decades ago which primed my young imagination with the thought of a small number of immortal beings that roam among us. Though the premise of Highlander is interesting, I always felt compelled to take it further. Not just a few centuries old immortals who feel compelled to remove each other’s heads. To me that seems kind of a weak reason.
If humanity held a tiny population of select immortals it seems that there would be a reason. For me, a valid reason would perhaps be for maintenance of developmental continuity. Maybe that’s a silly reason, but I’m going with it.
The Immortal Who Cannot Die
So then my daydreaming came up with a “what if” scenario. What if a person was born 15,000 years ago among the Anatolian Hunter-Gatherers. Born into a tribal early human existence, but just on the cusp of true development.
At around their mid to late twenties, they then simply stopped aging. The logistics of that alone would be a challenge. Obviously their contemporaries would see something was off.
But let’s not worry about that. Just focus on this person who stops aging, and cannot die. This circumstance would necessitate constantly moving and traveling. They would always need to be moving and migrating to another area and assimilating into new tribes, cultures, traditions, and societies.
This immortal being became a traveler out of necessity.
So as early Europeans evolved from hunter-gatherers into farmers, then into early cohesive cultures and proto civilizations, this immortal being would be witness to it all. From Anatolia, east to the Steppes of current day Ukraine and Russia. North and west and to all other reaches of Europe. From the Stone Age into the Bronze age. Countless civilizations and kingdoms rising and falling, and the spreading and merging of different cultures.
You could go on and on with this from the glacial maximum (ice age) to the warming which caused the ice sheets to recede, to the rise of the Bronze Age, the Bronze Age Collapse, into all that followed and into modern day Europe which I include the era just post Roman collapse.
So, imagine this person who has been alive to witness all of this. A woman, perhaps. She’s absorbed countless cultures and languages. She’s become a chameleon being able to adapt to anything. Who would she be? She’s acquired wisdom beyond anyone’s capacity to understand. She’s experienced loss, love, tragedy, greatness, despair, beginnings and endings to an extent that would be impossible to convey.
This person with a 15,000 year history.
Still in daydream mode: I meet her, she tells me her story, I believe her, I convince her to let me photograph her and to encompass as much of her history as I can into a single photograph; an amalgamation of 15,000 years of imprinting on a single human, and present it in a way that she chooses to represent it.
So I reached out to a hair and makeup artist friend of mine who is also really good with styling and ran my daydream by her. She loved it, and said, “Let’s do it!”
The next step was to find an appropriate model. That was a challenge for sure. In fact it kind of put a damper on the whole thing. I put out feelers and had a good response from multiple models. I connected with one, she was good to go and would have done well. But then decided she didn’t want to do it. I think she misunderstood what the concept was.
Then I landed on another who seemed excited, but then just ghosted me. I’m not sure why.
In a last-ditch effort, I posted on a local Facebook group a very short and high-level description of what I was after. That was when Rebekah answered. She has an acting background which I think was very beneficial. Plus, even her name, Rebekah, seemed to fit the concept. I can imagine an immortal woman who’d been alive for thousands of years having the name Rebekah.
We talked, I explained, she got it.
You’ve seen and experienced every human emotion there is. You counseled empires. You rode the Phoenician merchant ships across the Mediterranean Sea and wore the Tyrian Purple. You had a personal conversation with Alexander the Great and advised that he not put Persia under his rule. He ignored you, and you held his hand as he died. Cleopatra hated you, but envied and feared you because she discovered who you were.
You are the immortal who cannot die.
And Rebekah channeled it.
Model: Rebekah
Hair and Makeup: Kasey Kasai