Kerry Skarbakka wants to capture the feeling you get when you’re about to eat it — wrecking your bike, tripping down the stairs, falling off a ladder — and you know it. The ground comes flying up and for a split second you’re resigned to letting events take their course. To do that, he voluntarily throws himself off of things and takes a photo in midair.
He sets up these falling photos by scoping a location he likes and then figuring out what he needs to stay safe during the plunge. If he can get away without using ropes, great, but if he needs to, Skarbakka will wear a harness underneath his clothing and tie off to an anchor. He tries to keep the falls shorter than seven feet. His girlfriend usually snaps the photos, but he says he’s also occasionally resorted to asking random people on the street to push the button.
“I ask [people], ‘Can you press the shutter when I look most compromised?’ which often gets a weird reaction,” says Skarbakka, an assistant professor of digital media and photographic studies at Prescott College in Arizona.
When Skarbakka frames the shot, he likes to try and hide the rope from view. If the rope somehow makes it into the frame, he’ll Photoshop it out in post production. He then makes enormous prints of the photos — almost life size — which helps transport the viewer to the scene of the “accident.”
Predictably, there have been some mishaps during the picture-taking process. The worst injury he’s sustained is a broken rib, but he says there’s been innumerable bumps and bruises. Sometimes the location is so intense he won’t even try to fall. In the railroad bridge photo, for example, he leaned over the edge (while tied to one of the railroad tracks) just far enough to be at what looked like a point of no return. But he never actually jumped off.
He says most of the reaction to the work has been positive but occasionally misunderstood. In 2005 he worked with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on a performance piece where he was photographed as a special effects team dropped him off the museum’s roof dozens of times. A member of the media covering the event made a visual connection between the art and the people jumping out of the World Trade Center during 9/11 and quickly initiated a wave of backlash against Skarbakka, who says a comparison was never his intention.
“People got really mad,” he says.
At the moment Skarbakka says he’s trying to cull all the work together into a book and is actively looking for a publisher. In the future he’ll be incorporating the desert into his work — which is new to him because he recently moved to Arizona. He says he’s curious to know how we might change as a society if we were a little more resolved to the fact that a bit of chaos is inevitable.
“If we can give up that control, worry a little less about that existential anxiety, what would that do for us?” he says.
Falling Photos Force Us to Face Our Fundamental Fears
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Falling Photos Force Us to Face Our Fundamental Fears
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Falling Photos Force Us to Face Our Fundamental Fears
