Caleb

prefers his iced-tea divided into two glasses. The tea filled to the rim in one and the ice 3/4 full in another. It’s a solution that solves a few issues that we iced tea drinkers encounter and it also explains a lot about him.

We spent one day and night on Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau Alsaka. We were filming (yes, film) a story/commercial about a legally blind female Dog Musher (racer). How does a blind person drive a sled of dogs over a thousand miles? With sound. Caleb happens to be sound a recordist and his sound informed my images, not the usual protocol in filmmaking. A point of view is always the most crucial element in telling a compelling story and in this case, where a friendship begins.

Two hundred dogs howling is not a Bob Dylan line, it’s what happened to us at 2:40am and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard, the echo and reverb from the glacier ice and treeless mountains create a wash of 3 dimensional sound, Hendrix-like. Caleb is also a Dog-whisperer and trainer, I’m not sure how that relates and any speculation would be fiction.

The image attached is from that experience. I had to show you because it’s who he is when he’s not posing. Heroic, so much so that the a Boom Pole (sound gear) company used it on their 2021 promotional calendar, Caleb is also Mr. January. A way to tease him until the end of his days or mine, which ever comes first.

So Caleb, is from Barbados via Brooklyn. Educated by the English, he posses a vocabulary twice the size of mine. Thoughtful, informed, relaxed and always in search of an idea that helps explains the mess that we’re in. He’s a searcher and purveyor of the various truths, always evolving and yet steady as a rock.

We’ve circled around one another for over a decade now and it doesn’t matter how often we see one another, it’s not enough. Whether it’s a book, music, film, politics, the traumas of being a freelance film servant, or surfing a pandemic we always jump right in and our time is always cut short, after a few iced teas that it is.

Caleb is not used to being photographed, he slept though his first appointment time and didn’t arrive comfortable in his skin, until we started talking. He’s someone that I’ll never get enough of and I’m lucky to walk the earth while he’s here, we’re lucky to share the our time on earth and he’s a #portraitofafriend