In-demand Hollywood cinematographer Jomo Fray has called Brooklyn home for almost fifteen years. When Brooklyn Magazine rang Fray last week, he breathed a sigh of relief to be home after a marathon of appearances in Los Angeles. He was visiting the Gold Coast for industry events supporting his new Oscar-contender film, Nickel Boys.
In Nickel Boys, author Colson Whitehead imagines the untold stories of Black teens at Florida’s real-life Dozier School, a brutal reformatory in the Jim Crow South. When Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is sent to the school, he forms an unlikely bond with Turner (Brandon Wilson), a tough student. Together, they fight to maintain their humanity in a system where survival for Black boys often came down to where they did—and didn’t—look.
Fray’s camera direction in the film adaptation of Nickel Boys gives the characters of Elwood and Turner agency and life, turning their struggle into a singular reflection of racial injustice.
We caught up with Fray ahead of the film’s wider release (January 20) to discuss his return to Whitehead’s work and which neighborhoods he’s pulling inspiration from.
When you’re at home in Brooklyn, do you have any places that make it home for you?
Oh my God — so many. I just stay in Brooklyn. If I can cut down on going to Manhattan, I do. My spots are Nighthawk, Alamo Drafthouse on Court Street, and BAM, for sure.
I used to work at MoCADA (Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts) over a decade ago, so I have a deep connection with that space. There are places that I check in on as soon as I get home. Restaurants like Olmsted on Vanderbilt Avenue that has a rotating menu.
How do you recharge your proverbial batteries when you’re in Brooklyn?
Honestly, I like walking along Gates Avenue and moving on through into Bed-Stuy. I really love doing big loops where I take a camera with me. We’ll do a 40-minute walk through those neighborhoods that feel so enriching. You see so many different people, so many different places, so many different communities and cultures.
Brooklyn is such a cinematic space. I think so much of my work is about a deep fascination with humans and the complexity of being human. What I love about New York is that, and what I love about Brooklyn specifically, is that you can just walk through these spaces and see people. You can see such a huge diversity of people. Not even just racially or culturally, but socioeconomically, and I feel like that is so giving.
What are the most cinematic places in Brooklyn for you as a cinematographer?
Crown Heights. I lived there for almost a decade and I think, as someone who’s Caribbean, hearing sounds that I grew up hearing, smelling things I grew up smelling, and being able to get seasonal Caribbean drinks like a Sorrel that only comes around at Christmas.
Now there’s a church down the street from me and I always shoot the parking lot of this church. I’ve shot it maybe 100 times, but for whatever reason, it always feels fascinating each time I pass it. The way the light hits or if they’re setting something up in front of the church. Even if it’s just an empty lot, or if there’s a van alone in the parking lot, there’s something about that space that’s just evocative.
Nickel Boys is your second movie based on a book by Colson Whitehead after leading second unit cinematography on The Underground Railroad. What draws you back to Whitehead’s work?
It really was being drawn to both Barry and RaMell [Ross] and then once I knew that it was a Colson piece, I knew it was going to give us all the structure we needed to build something interesting and something unique.
What’s amazing about Colson’s work is it’s such a rich platform for auteur directors to inject and infuse that structure with their style. The Underground Railroad was such an amazing vessel for someone like Barry Jenkins to infuse it with his art and fuse it with the images in his life and his memory and thinking through those processes. I think the same thing for Nickel Boys. It was just such an amazing skeleton for someone like RaMell to add bone, sinew, tissue, and skin to. His writing is so specific, but also so open for an interpretive experience with it.
I also noticed on your IMDB for Nickel Boys you’re listed as director of photography, but for most of your work, it says you were the cinematographer. Could you explain the difference?
In film history, people use cinematographer and director of photography synonymously, but if we’re asking me to distinguish between those two terms; a cinematographer captures images in motion and the director of photography covers that aspect of cinematography and also management. The director of photography oversees multiple departments and makes sure they’re working in tandem and building toward the director’s vision.
I think that the job is really about listening to the director, listening to the script, listening to the actors, and trying to create an image that just holds all of those conceptual ideas, but makes them into a concrete image that you can look at and interpret what’s going on.
Do you feel like you’re performing in the movie in the way an actor performs because of the way you shot Nickel Boys?
That was a profound challenge to me as a cinematographer. There’s a way in which RaMell would often ask in prep: “What would the world look like if every image that had ever been taken was taken by a person as if they were taking an image of their brother, their mother, their sister, or their friend?” There’s a way in which when you take an image of your mother it’s unlike any other image anyone else in the world will take of your mother because there’s a way in which you see that person in a totally different way. You can’t help but bring to bear the specificity of that relationship.
This is just such an interesting process because when you’re operating the camera, it’s not me operating anymore as Jomo, I need to operate as Elwood. And so when Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor hugs me, it’s not Aunjanue hugging Jomo. At that moment, through the camera and when we’re running that scene, it is Elwood hugging Hattie. When the camera pulls away the audience sees Hattie differently.
I’m curious if you would ever shoot a movie in this style again.
I never want to say I wouldn’t do anything, but it felt so attached to this specific movie. Dealing with stories about real boys and real lives made this perspective shift feel so important as a way for us to give them life and honor them. I absolutely will reach for this point of view language in other movies because it can be so intimate. But in terms of an entire movie, I think it would be up to the director.
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