Fifty Millimeters in the Golden Hour
I’d been following Rockie Nolan’s photographs on Lookbook for months before I got around to actually talking to her. Something about her work—sun-drenched, consistently golden, as if every frame had been made on the last good afternoon of autumn—had gotten under my skin in a way I couldn’t dismiss as just another pretty feed. She was nineteen, studying photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and already shooting with an instinct that felt several years ahead of her age.
She grew up in Lubbock, Texas, which she described without sentimentality as the second most conservative city in America. I’m very liberal,
she said. My city is full of cattle ranchers, Bible worshippers, and pregnant teenagers.
There was a college there, which had drawn in a thin layer of like-minded people and made things marginally livable, and a modest music and art scene she didn’t have many illusions about. She got looks when she left the house in anything that didn’t match the standard student silhouette. She didn’t seem to lose much sleep over it.
Her visual sensibility was built around golden hour and the construction of character. She liked to start shoots at sunset and always aimed to create a complete small person inside the frame—someone who existed beyond the edge of the photograph. Her tool was a 50mm f/1.8 lens, which she planned to keep using indefinitely. There’s a specific discipline in that kind of commitment: you stop negotiating with the equipment and start working with the world as it is.
Style-wise, Jenny Lewis was the dominant influence—Lewis being the lead singer and primary creative force of Rilo Kiley, a fact I made a small fool of myself about during our conversation by treating the two as entirely separate entities. Rockie corrected me with the patience of someone accustomed to being the most informed person in the room on this subject. Most of her outfits came from thrift stores and she rarely spent more than twenty dollars on any one of them. She was hoping vintage would keep dominating fashion for the foreseeable future, largely because she planned to keep wearing it regardless. If not,
she added, I’ll probably end up as either an antique shop owner or a cat lady. But I’m fine with either.
Her biggest role model was her mother, who had supported her creative work with what Rockie called an incredible passion. A parent who takes your art seriously when you’re still a teenager in a deeply conservative Texas city—that’s not a small thing, and she knew it.
She met her boyfriend Andrew at SCAD, where they were both studying photography. They’d had mutual friends online before either of them arrived at school, but the shift happened the night they ended up alone together watching Scrubs in her room. I was really nervous,
she said, because we’d never spent time alone before.
By the time we spoke, they’d been together nine months.
Her favorite films made a coherent portrait of someone with a very specific romantic-melancholy sensibility: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Virgin Suicides, Spirited Away, Amélie. On music she could have gone on indefinitely—Jenny Lewis again, Tegan and Sara, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Decemberists, Mates of State, Soko. She read Vogue, Nylon, and i-D.
The red hair came up. It always does. She’d been teased for it relentlessly as a kid and had come out the other side with only certainty. I wouldn’t trade it for any other color in the world,
she said. Jenny Lewis had told her she loved it when they first met, which made for what Rockie called a really nice day. I believe her. Where she wanted to end up was in fashion photography—shooting the Urban Outfitters catalog was the specific dream—and she’d spent her summer working toward it. Looking at what she was already making, the distance didn’t seem that large.