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A photograph of Raven Jackson, Jomo Fray, and a camera assistant (from left to right) on the set of All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt along with two actors from the film. They are in a lush green forested area. Jackson holds a monitor and faces away from the camera. Fray holds the camera on his shoulder and faces away from the camera. The camera assistant reaches for the back of the camera to support.

Issue 007 Fall/Winter 2024 Features In Focus

In Focus: Jomo Fray

A Cinematographer's Image-Making Manifesto

By Jomo Fray

October 17, 2024

Photo by Jaclyn Martinez. Courtesy of A24.

“Memory is the source of your creation.”
—Akira Kurosawa1 

 

“Artists are not magicians or shamans, prophets or seers. We make stuff, and the devices we use to ‘transfigure the commonplace’ are recognizable. Isolate, re-contextualize, shift scale, shift material, invert, etc.”
—Kerry James Marshall, Young Artist to Be 2

The hand of a child is dipped halfway into a murky, green, body of water. On the hand are pieces of dirt and little fish are approaching.
Still from "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt" 2023. Courtesy of A24.

Transfiguring the commonplace is at the heart of image-making. As humans, we experience our lives daily, but with art we can reorganize the things we have seen or heard to create space to witness our world or our feelings anew. I believe Akira Kurosawa is gesturing towards the threads that hold the work together and, in so doing, connect us. I don’t believe Kurosawa is saying all art is a collection of our memories but that memories are the building blocks from which all art is made. Kerry James Marshall might say of this idea that the creation of art is the process of transmuting our memories and their internal make-up into something new and different. To me, our memories hold the ribosomal matter that constitutes artistic expression. At the heart of memory is emotion—remembering not only the event but the feeling conjured from the event. We experience compassion through our connection to our emotional remembrances: I have felt X in the past, so I can imagine how they might be feeling Y. We create pathways toward empathy, even for situations that could be fundamentally different from our own. 

In a wooded neighborhood, a white house is engulfed in flames. Near the house, a person stands in white, their back to the camera, watching the house burn. On the left, a man in blue coveralls throws a bucket of water on the fire. Two other people watch off to the side. Another man rushes from the street towards the fire. On the street, furthest away, three young girls dressed in colorful outfits stand still in front of the fire, only their backs are visible.
Still from "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," 2023. Courtesy of A24.

I think cinema is an art that speaks in emotional remembrance: it reproduces human memory and human dreams. Cinema allows those emotional remembrances more pliability than we would experience normally, as film can take our life and help us see it through the life of another—to gain clarity peering through the distortion of the looking glass. Ideally, that makes the movie a dialectic experience rather than a monologic one. The film becomes a conversation between the viewer and the piece, and the piece is strengthened by inviting the viewer in because it’s symbolically dense enough to hold that projection. In a movie like In the Mood for Love (2000) by Wong Kar-wai, the slow languid dolly shots following Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Maggie Cheung are not emotional in and of themselves but are deeply so to me because they invite the viewer to remember their own loves lost. And the familiarity of the feeling, conjured by the image, engenders a more profound experience. 

For a cinematographer, the art of cinematic image making is the art of transmuting your director’s ideation into the actual—translating their vision into something a person can see and feel. The collaboration is hopefully the process of the two of you learning to dream together. The question for me is always: how do we infuse our creative process with memory, with emotional remembrance, and how do we make images that are dialectic? All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023) was such an incredible opportunity because the director, Raven Jackson, welcomed some of these more conceptual ways of working and thinking. One of the ways we tried to create emotionally empathic images was through the process of writing and following a visual manifesto. 

A large willow tree with many huge branches sits in a grassy field. People sit, scattered across the branches. They lounge along its length. In the foreground there are two people standing looking out at something in the distance.
Still from "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," 2023. Courtesy of A24.

Manifesto:

01 Stay elemental in the approach

02 Remember water, remember wind

03 The wound is where the light gets in — embody it in every frame

A man and child stand in front of a window. The window overlooks an open green grassy field with trees scattered throughout. The sun emits a yellow hazy glow over the field. In the foreground, the man and child hold one another. Only the man’s profile is visible while the young girl faces away from the camera.
Still from "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," 2023. Courtesy of A24.

The first thing Raven told me about the script was that she wanted to create a project in search of the ineffable moments that make up a life. Towards that goal, we wanted to build a style of working that would help us foster and find those images—images that could not be orchestrated but only discovered. Before principal photography started, we spent a week just looking at art together, and it was out of that week that we wrote our 12-point manifesto for the film. We would read it together every morning before we started filming. 

A diagram of Jomo's plan to shoot a scene for "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt." Photos of the set are overlayed on a grid with arrows pointing to potential camera angles. "Shot list rides here:" is written at the top.
Courtesy Jomo Fray.

04 Stay close, stay wide

05 Speak in slant rhymes

06 Embody a raw genre

A woman wearing red lipstick and a white dress stands in a bathroom. She looks at herself in the mirror. A light above the mirror emits a yellow glow.
Still from "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," 2023. Courtesy of A24.

The beauty of image making for me is the translation from the ethereal to the actual. I love for the visual references in a film to be as conceptual as possible, because that forces the director and me to be in a process of interpretation and translation. That helps us sharpen the juxtapositions in the script so the images are not merely illustrative but truly dialectic—they become laden with meaning so the viewer can grab onto a host of different feelings that resonate. 

Four people sit around a yellow kitchen table. On the table, there is a half gutted fish with some of its parts strewn over a piece of newspaper.
Still from "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," 2023. Courtesy of A24.

07 Strive to be in an unending state of nowness within the constant movement of time

08 To be tactile is to have details

09 Landscape as character

010 Compose in depth

A woman and a younger girl sit in a misty wooded area. They both wear white tops and look at one another. They face away from the camera so only their profiles are visible.
Still from "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," 2023. Courtesy of A24.

The manifesto became the litmus test through which everything passed. It helped galvanize our approach and our images; we wanted to build a reactive style that still had an internally designed poetic logic. The manifesto helped ground the look of the work and put us as filmmakers in conversation with the images we were making. We were following the path the film wanted us to take. That sounds hifalutin, but each day we had a detailed plan and were willing to change our plan if something more interesting was happening on set. The manifesto helped us understand what qualified as more interesting. That way even when we went off track, the work was being held together by this set of higher-order intentions. As a director, Raven is so incredibly sensitive and articulate about how she wants a scene to feel and how she wants a shot to look that the manifesto created a real shorthand language between us on set. It felt like we moved as one unit most days.

A close up photo of two hands holding each other as well as a blue, white, and red towel or piece of cloth.
Still from "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," 2023. Courtesy of A24.

011 Be evocative above else

012 Be in the moment — be present to the cinema on set

Raven Jackson and Jomo Fray stand in front of colorful storefronts. A sign hanging on one of the store fronts reads “Black and White Dept. Store.”
Courtesy Jomo Fray.

Footnotes:

  1. “My Life in Cinema: Akira Kurosawa,” filmed in 1993 for the Directors Guild of Japan, video, https://www.criterionchannel.com/videos/my-life-in-cinema-akira-kurosawa.
  2.  In Peter Nesbett, Sarah Andress, and Shelly Bancroft (eds.), Letters to a Young Artist (New York: Darte Publishing, 2006).

Bio

Jomo Fray

Jomo Fray is an award-winning cinematographer. Some recent honors include a 2024 Independent Spirit Award nomination. He was also featured as one of the 2018 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine and one of the 2022 American Cinematographer Magazine’s Rising Stars of Cinematography. His most recent feature film work includes Runner (Toronto International Film Festival 2022), All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Sundance 2023), and The Young Wife (South by Southwest 2023).

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