Director RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” has an intimacy to its photography that immerses you in the harrowing story adapted from Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel. Framed through a first-person perspective, the story of two Black teens attending a harsh reformatory school during the Jim Crow South is layered by cinematographer Jomo Fray in a “symbolically dense” palette so that the “images rhymed with other images in the piece.” The result? A camera language that Fray says “invites the viewer to almost project their mind into this movie.” The hurdle was finding evocative moments that break away from the first-person viewpoint. One such instance is a mirrored image of a young Elwood Curtis as he stares at a hot iron. “We loved the distortion and warping of the reflection into this period iron precisely because it’s unclear. It invites the audience to see themselves in the image,” Fray says. “It also has a feeling of how small you are as Elwood in a larger world, and there’s aspects of wonderment, which is an important aspect in the story. The fascinating thing about human life is it’s full of irreconcilable aspects, that despite the inhumanity of the system, and of the Jim Crow South, there’s still beauty.”
