Featured Artist | JD Creative Direction

Featured Interview | JD Creative Direction

Creative Name: JD Creative Direction

Real Name: Janelle Social Media: Inst @jdcreativedirection

Brief Description of self: I am the most passionate person I know.

Long Description of self: I identify as both a creative director and model. I first began creative direction work through concepts I came up with as a model. The more I did this, the more I modeled my ideas in front of a camera, the more than I wanted other people to experience this themselves. I genuinely feel like everyone should get to do their dream photoshoot and I want to be the person to do that for them.

Project Name: Before I Cross Over.

Project Details: This editorial was inspired by a very traumatizing experience in my life. On January 1, 2020, my first dog and best friend accidentally fell into my father’s pool and drowned. It was very hard to cope with given that this kind of death is not in a sense peaceful. It taught me a hard lesson about how life truly isn’t fair to the good hearted and that your world can change in a second. So what I wanted to do for this project was to somehow recreate her final few moments as something ethereal and without pain; something I hope that my best friend felt before she crossed over. The pool serves as both a literal location and as a purgatorial state for the character in this shoot, even down to the funerary attire. By utilizing the incoming light sources from the windows and the pool lights, there is the constant sense of heaven close by and all that has to be done by this person is to simply let go. The emotion displayed by Julia was a combination of both soft and somber; as in this feeling of being ready to leave the body, yet there is a sense of sadness knowing that she will be gone from the lives of those she has loved. And maybe this project can serve as my way of saying goodbye the way that she deserved.

Model: Julia Hessler, @huliafone. Photographer: Destiny Martinez, @destinymartinezdotcom.

Medium & why: Creative direction because I had this story I wanted to tell. I wanted to turn the feelings of grief and trauma into something cathartic for myself and anyone that has ever lost someone unexpectedly.

Advice to other aspiring artists: Storytelling is a cross-cultural, significant human experience we have the ability to do. It existed before written language and now we see it in the art around us. Believe in your story, see it as something to be valued and as something that can lend a hand to others looking for answers within.