Rockie Nolan
Rockie Nolan’s photographs are all golden hour. Sunset, a 50mm 1.8, and these small characters she creates in each frame—that’s how she describes her method. When I asked if there were techniques or secrets, she laughed it off. Sunset. Character. That’s it. The rest is just showing up.
She’s nineteen, studying photography at Savannah College of Art and Design, and she’s from Lubbock, Texas, which she described as the second most conservative city in America. Not lightly. Ranchers, churches, pregnant teenagers, and a handful of college kids trying to survive it. She’s liberal, fashion-forward, visibly herself—which meant getting looks in Lubbock. People there don’t expect style that doesn’t match their own baseline of acceptable. You wear the student uniform or you get noticed for not wearing it.
Her taste is specific and consistent. Jenny Lewis as a north star (she was genuinely delighted to learn that Jenny Lewis fronts Rilo Kiley, thinking they were two different people). Red hair, which she won’t trade for anything despite the childhood teasing. Thrift stores, never more than twenty dollars an outfit. Films like Eternal Sunshine, The Virgin Suicides, Spirited Away, and Amélie—the good sad beautiful ones. Weird Lifetime movies at three in the morning when she can’t sleep. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Decemberists, Tegan and Sara. i-D magazine, Vogue. There’s a coherence to it that reads as genuine, not assembled from lookbooks.
At Savannah she met Andrew, also a photography student. They’d had mutual friends online first, then ended up alone one day watching Scrubs, both nervous and unsure what they were doing. Nine months in and it had stuck. She spoke about missing her best friends back home the way you speak about something you genuinely love—they dance for no reason, philosophize over coffee, model sometimes. The kind of friends that make leaving harder.
For now it’s fashion photography. She’d done some editorial work that summer and wanted to keep going, maybe eventually shoot for Urban Outfitters. If that doesn’t happen, she said without sentimentality, she’ll own a vintage store or become a cat lady. She seemed equally at peace with either outcome, which is a kind of confidence that young people either have or don’t.
There’s something about meeting someone who knows exactly what she likes at nineteen. Not in an arrogant way—Rockie’s genuinely unbothered about whether anyone else agrees. It all adds up to a self that’s clearly defined and defended, in a place that wasn’t exactly built for that. I suspect Lubbock’s going to miss her long after she figures out how to do this for a living.