She does not look like anyone you have met. That is the point.
Her crown was not found in any garden. It was built: painted branches and bleached roots, great leaves the colour of old rose, pink tulips that will never wilt because they were never alive. Only the dry blossoms and a few sprigs of juniper ever grew in the earth. The rest is made, and it is heavy. It rises over her and spreads around her face until it is hard to say whether she is wearing it or it is wearing her. A leaf has closed over her mouth. Only her eyes are left free, and they are looking straight at you.
Some people hold that the camera's duty is to show the world as it is. She is the answer of the other kind of people: those who believe that everything real is only the beginning of the picture. Nothing in the world, however lovely, can match what a gifted imagination gathers over a lifetime in its own depths. Whoever limits himself to copying what is in front of him will spend his life repeating the world's beauty, and never adding a single line of his own.
But imagination has its price, and she is wearing it. A vision that grows large enough begins to swallow the one who carries it. A visionary is not someone who sees what is there. It is someone who sees what could be there, builds it leaf by leaf, and then must find a way to keep breathing inside it.
On the same night of 2015, among the other full-length experiments of that shoot, a flash failed. Only one powerful light behind the scene fired, and the wind itself drew the smoke out of the darkness. That accidental frame, Dark Soul, won the Proify Awards in 2016, and it struck the artist so deeply that it seemed to mark out, like a map, the way he has followed ever since: into the night.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2015.)
