Broken Empire

Broken Empire 041920.i8-rc

This image is taken from a music video I made with Country Florist. In the video, a lone figure dressed in a cardboard costume of a Roman soldier carries the bust of Caesar across a barren landscape. The story leads him to the edge of a cliff, where he’s meant to hurl the empire’s symbol into the abyss. But in truth, we were too afraid of the drop, so instead, we smashed it against the ground and framed it as though it had fallen into the void. That’s the illusion of film: it makes you believe in what never happened. And maybe that’s not so different from the illusions we live under: security, justice, government, power. Empires don’t fall in one dramatic gesture; they crumble in pieces, quietly, at our feet.

Broken Empire 041920.i8-rc is an original photograph from the Jump The Gun series, captured with an iPhone 6 and skillfully edited using the free Rookie Cam app. This piece exemplifies the use of accessible technology to create striking visual art, highlighting innovative techniques in mobile photography and post-processing.