Revised & Remastered from archives in 2016
The year was 1991 and I was working on a Britny Fox Album cover for East West Records. “Bite Down Hard” was a Forbidden Fruit themed project, and I quickly realized this was gonna call for a really, really, Big Black Snake. Containing said snake meant a call to Jules Sylvester of Reptile Rentals, “Snakes, Spiders, and Scorpions for every occasion!” As expected, he had just the snake I needed – a super sweet, giant, black Rat Snake that had doubled for a Black Mamba in a ton of movies (she was actually super famous)…
In 2016, I was going through my archives and came across the original film for this shoot. The session was shot on 4×5 film (as I did with many album covers back them). I don’t know what I was thinking – shooting a live snake with a large format view camera, but that’s what I did. Oh, to be young and dumb…
For the “2016 remix”, I decide to use the entire piece of film “full frame”. It started full color, but I was liking it better in Black & White, with the color brought back ever so slightly. Being a big piece of original film, it reminded me of a Wet Plate so I added a series of wet plate processing anomalies as a look.
Sometimes, it’s just fun to approach an image from a completely different headspace in a different time of life. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This one worked, and I was super-happy with it.
