Self-confessed analog devotee Erik Madigan Heck was in Amsterdam this summer visiting noted Dutch author Remco Campert and his wife Deborah Wolf when inspiration struck for his latest labor of love, The Summer’s End. “I wanted to work on another short around a poem,” explains the photographer and director. "And he [Remco] presented me with 'Clear Lake, Iowa,' which he had written based on his wife Deborah’s intense childhood recollection of it."

In a bid to reconstruct the memory on film, Heck applied his indefatigable blend of fine art and fashion, casting model Jamie Bochert in a fleeting role as Deborah. “Iowa is one of the least interesting places in the world,” he notes after journeying to the Midwest for the project. “I was really interested in romanticizing a place that couldn’t be more unromantic.”

The cello-scored short distills Heck’s fixation with rugged landscapes, saturated color, and grainy textures also seen in his recent 14-page series The Old Masters for the The New York Times Magazine—a survey of iconoclasts still working at the top of their fields well into their 80s (inc. Tony Bennett, Justice Ruth Ginsburg, Betty White, Frank Gehry and more). “I find myself using film in a very intentionally nostalgic way, and similar to Tacita Dean, I can’t give up analog,” he says. “It’s just like making moving sketches; they're implicitly nostalgic before the subject matter even comes to fruition.”