It began, as many great adventures do, with an unexpected glimpse of something fantastic and the sickening sound of breaking glass.
Red and Jonny Evans were on their honeymoon, eyeing the many geeky delights at a toy show, when something caught his eye.
"I had just bought a complete set of Star Wars drinking glasses when I saw the helmet," Jonny said in an e-mail to Raw File. In his excitement, he dropped the bag holding his recent purchase, breaking two of the glasses. Embarrassed, he asked his new wife to talk to the dealer, and she returned triumphant, the proud owner of a stormtrooper helmet.
The white headgear, one of the most recognizable icons of Star Wars fandom, turned out to be an ideal vehicle for the Canadian couple to explore their mutual love of art and science fiction. They took turns wearing the stormtrooper helmet around the toy show, photographing each other to make themselves laugh, and they've been doing it ever since: In hundreds of their photos, you'll see Red (usually wearing a dress) and/or Johnny (often sporting a suit) wearing a stormtrooper helmet while engaged in some totally down-to-earth pursuits.
Jonny, who is especially partial to Star Wars' "bad guys," said he views the stormtrooper as a symbol for the everyman.
"Stormtroopers are just people," he said, "Mostly conscripts into the Empire ... the average Joe stuck in a crummy situation, doing a crummy job poorly."
Underneath all that white Imperial armor (and in between all those missed blaster shots), the couple figured real human hearts must beat.
"We loved the idea of two stormtroopers falling in love after the fall of the Empire and settling to a small country town in Ontario, Canada," said Jonny, who lives in Caledonia, Ontario, with his wife and photographic partner. "To live simple lives and take lots of silly photos of each other, like every other couple in love living happily ever after."
Red and Jonny created several sets of images of the stormtrooper couple, which grew out of the long-term nature of their project. In the series In a Gallery Far, Far Away, they collect pictures of themselves wearing the simple stormtrooper helmets as they gazed upon famous works of art, asking security guards to take snapshots of them in front of Van Goghs and Rothkos. In The Wild AT-ATs of Caledonia, they use their toy collection to create documentary-style scenes of the clumsy armored troop transport vehicles re-imagined as wild creatures living in the woods behind their house.
The photo project soon became a part of Red and Jonny's daily lives, inspiring them to imagine – then seek to create – sometimes-elaborate visual storylines incorporating the Star Wars military headwear.
"Sometimes it would be a long-thought-out, staged photo we'd been planning for weeks in our heads," said Jonny. "Sometimes it was just as simple as, 'Pull the car over.'"
Jonny has been a Star Wars fan since he was a child, begging his parents to take him to see The Empire Strikes Back as many times as they could stand; he estimates he's seen the movie 20 times in theaters. Every time he read a book, his mother would reward him with a Star Wars figurine, and he recalls his greatest childhood memory being the year he got a Millennium Falcon.
"I loved and lived Star Wars," he said.
Red, on the other hand, was a "country girl," growing up among hills of wildflowers, sans television. "She had heard of Star Wars but mostly mixed it up with Star Trek," said Jonny.
When the couple decided to live together, Jonny was hesitant to unpack his boxes of Star Wars paraphernalia too quickly. To get her ready for the big reveal, he convinced her to watch Star Wars with him. They burned through the entire original trilogy, and she loved every film. Encouraged by her newfound appreciation of the films, he finally showed her his toy collection.
"She freaked out and was like, 'No way! We have an AT-AT!?'" he said. "She brought out [from the boxes] all her favorite stuff and put it all over the house. [Now] our house looks like a toy store. It's awesome."
Jonny and Red are both artists, so naturally a set of pictures that began as an inside joke between the two grew into hundreds of photos over the years, shared and admired publicly on their Flickr page.
One of their early shoots involved a trip to Niagara Falls, where they donned matching helmets atop their wedding clothes and posed for pictures at the famous tourist trap. There, they were recognized by a group of Chinese tourists who'd seen the couple's photos in a Beijing newspaper. They were featured in Star Wars Insider magazine, and even did a spot on Canadian television.
As their Flickr fan base grows, they continue taking photos mostly to entertain each other. Besides cementing the couple as Canadian cosplay celebrities of sorts, there are other benefits to using your significant other as your artistic muse, Jonny explained.
"After all this time, it's fun to look back at [our work] and see that the photos have become a chronicle of our marriage," he said.
All photos: Courtesy of RedandJonny
