LEHI — Over the past three years, Josh Rossi has become accustomed to saying no. He’s had to do it over and over again, sending rote declinations to thousands of families who have requested his services.
Still, he’s never gotten comfortable doing it.
A resident of Lehi, Rossi is a commercial photographer who became a viral sensation three years ago after facilitating a superhero-themed photo shoot for a group of young children.
Each child was suffering from a serious health condition, ranging from cancer to a deformed heart, and Rossi wanted to showcase their inner strength to the world. Superheroes seemed a fitting comparison, so he went to work buying costumes, photographing the kids in a professional studio, editing the shots and presenting the families with the images.
“Justice League Kids” exploded online.
“It hit about 240 million views online, and we got flooded with requests to do the same thing for people’s kids,” Rossi said. “I got over 2,000 emails. The problem was, though, we couldn’t fulfill on all of those, just because ... I had work. There’s no way we could have done it. And so we just went through all the emails denying everybody.”
He has done as many shoots as possible over the years, photographing kids here and there, but for each family he has been able to help, there are a thousand others he had to apologetically write back to explain that he couldn’t make it happen.
But Rossi is determined to change that in 2021 and has dreamed up his largest project yet. He is planning to take his family on the road for a monthslong trip across the country, stopping to photograph kids in major cities before moving onto other destinations.
It means he finally gets to say yes.
“If you have the ability to affect somebody’s life in that way, how can it be, like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to do anything?’ Or … ‘Oh cool, I did it for a few people,’” Rossi said.
Wonder Woman
The superhero photo shoots began as an activity for Rossi to do with his daughter several years ago. He decided that turning her into Wonder Woman would be an amusing project.
“I’m a commercial photographer, and so I’m used to working with these really big budgets and sets and costumes and all that,” Rossi said. “And at some point, I was like, ‘Well, why don’t I just have fun and do something for my daughter?’”
It didn’t stay contained for long, however.
“From that, we basically thought, ‘OK, who are the real superheroes in society, then?’ I kind of felt guilt because my daughter was super healthy and had no issues,” he said. “I just realized there are all these kids out there who could totally use this.”
And that’s how “Justice League Kids” took off.
It was a private venture, and Rossi did most of the coordination with families and kids himself, not to mention doing the photography and editing, which lengthened the process.
“We weren’t working with a charity,” Rossi said. “It was just us, just this project we wanted to do. We actually tried to go through the hospitals, and we tried to get support for this, but there was so much red tape, nobody would budge; nobody would help us with it. So we had to fund the project, and we also had to find the kids, and it took months to do that. But finally, we did.”
Because of the informal coordination at times, some of the project’s recipients took a little convincing to get onboard. Andrew Loftus said he still doesn’t know how Rossi found out about his daughter, Sofie, and her battle with rhabdomyosarcoma, a soft tissue cancer.
During Sofie’s treatment in 2017, his family received an out-of-the-blue offer from Rossi’s wife to photograph Sofie as Wonder Woman for the “Justice League Kids” project, and after a little back-and-forth, Loftus ended up agreeing.
He has been grateful ever since.
“It was just crazy,” Loftus said of the experience. “I guess you could say magical. It was something I’d never experienced before, and I don’t think anyone in our family had ever had something like that, so profound, happen.”
He said seeing the finished product provided “pure strength” and lightened the demeanor not only of his daughter, but his entire family.
Sofie was nearly 4 at the time of the photo shoot; she’s 7 now and still has the poster hanging on her wall.
“We’ve moved since then, and it was like, ‘OK. Where is the poster? That has to make (the trip),’” Loftus said.
“We knew she was as strong as she could be, but just having that suit, for whatever reason, brought the confidence out of her. After the shoot, we took the suit off, and obviously she’s since outgrown it, but she still has that confidence that was instilled in becoming that powerful icon.”
Reactions like that were not limited to the six children who participated in “Justice League Kids,” either, and soon Rossi was getting thousands of requests for additional photo shoots — requests that, all too often, he couldn’t fulfill.
“Once it blew up, we didn’t know what to do with it, cause we’re like, ‘We’re not going to monetize from this; we’re not going to, like, charge kids to do their photos.’”
Rossi has primarily worked alone on these projects, a side gig to his normal day job, which constrains his ability to work with large numbers of children.
He also has a family and three kids of his own to look after.
“It’s been, like, a long process of me thinking through how am I going to support my family and do this amazing project and help other families,” he said. “(My) first priority is my own family, like trying to support them. And so I’ve had this mental debate for years on, like, how do I get this done?”
‘Changing the world’
Like the heroes inspiring the way Rossi dresses the kids, he wants to change the world — to use his skills to help others.
“I’ve always wanted to do something with my photography that is actually meaningful,” he said. “And so after these projects … I told (my wife) one day, ‘I just want to do something that changes the world.’ And we looked at each other, and we’re like, ‘Wait, I think we actually are doing something that is changing the world.’”
With COVID-19 changing schedules and loosening the tethers of school and work, he knew it was now or never to make his mark.
So he made plans to put his and his family’s life on hold. Beginning in February 2021, they will strike out across the U.S., starting in Utah and working down to major cities in the south, heading east to cities like Miami and New York before hitting the Midwest and coming back.
They will be staying in Airbnbs, photographing kids early in the week, then editing and photoshopping and finally unveiling the art to the children before moving on.
However, it turns out that changing the world is expensive, and Rossi is doing it without a primary backer. Unlike Iron Man and Batman, he doesn’t have access to endless resources.
Costumes alone cost, on average, $1,000 each, Rossi said, and he allows the kids and their families to keep them afterward, meaning he has to order new ones for each child.
Rossi has started a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the project, with a goal of $80,000, which he says will cover basic expenses, such as travel costs, studio rentals and costumes.
“Obviously, it’s a lot of money to raise,” he said. “Totally. But from the series we did before, a lot of people were asking, ‘How do we donate?’ So now we have a way for people to donate. We’re seeing that it’s gaining traction; there are a lot of people that are coming onboard, so I’m not really worried.”
Indeed, the project has already caught the eye of Patty Jenkins, the director who brought “Wonder Woman” to the big screen in 2017, and she tweeted support for the “incredibly moving project” Tuesday.
The impact
Brandy Ellis gets choked up while talking about what Rossi’s work has meant to her family.
Her son, Kyle Ellis, was terminally ill with a mitochondrial disease in 2017 and was granted a wish from the Make-A-Wish Foundation before passing.
The family wanted Rossi to do a portrait of Kyle as Superman — to create a lasting memory of how they saw him: strong despite his physical limitations.
“We liked that because with mitochondrial disease it’s your body making yourself sick,” Brandy Ellis said. “Your body can’t produce enough energy for major organs to keep up, so we kind of looked at it like his body was the kryptonite, you know, making him sick, and he was the Superman.”
“He was our superhero.”
Ellis and her family live in Florida, and they had a separate photographer do the photo shoot and then send the images to Rossi so he could work his magic.
Seeing the finished product was overwhelmingly emotional for Ellis.
“That’s how I saw my son,” she said. “So to see it on a canvas, to see it in my mind, the way I saw my son, that picture just — it melted me. … It’s amazing, and I can’t even tell you what it means to our family.”
Loftus and Ellis are both great supporters of Rossi’s work, but they also made note of the man behind the camera and how grateful they are for his efforts.
“Josh is amazing. He is amazingly talented,” Ellis said. “We need more of this right now. We need more people wanting to help others and to help kids like this. Our world needs some good news right now.”
“If there’s anybody questioning whether they should help to back this project, to financially help him, put yourself in our family’s shoes and these parents’ shoes to be able to have that one time where these kids can put on a costume and just feel special. … If you’re capable and you have the means, back this project, back Josh.”