As I begin a new photographic project concerning fairy tale and mythological narratives, I find it important that I examine why I am so attracted to the subject. Reflecting upon my artistic work from my college years, I have noticed that most of my work has been centered around this theme in some form.
I first studied drawing and animation as a freshman and only recently have I began to work solely in the medium of photography. As a final project for Fall Quarter of 2008 (in the program entitled Image and Sequence), I created a series of charcoal drawings in which I juxtaposed drawn images over pages of text. The series, entitled Reading Between the Lines was a conceptual piece meant to reference the gap that exists between the written word and imagined images inspired by the latter. In my artist statement, I concluded that certain images seen in the minds’ eye cannot be represented by words alone… which explains my fascination with illustration. I am always interested in how stories get translated from the written word into the visual realm. Below are selected pieces from the series.
During the Winter Quarter of 2009, I decided to work with Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. I illustrated a graphic novella and created a short animation that told the first part of the story. What I found most interesting about Andersen’s tale was the obvious moralistic values embedded into the story: good always triumphs over evil and a childlike innocence should never be lost.
Below are selected pages from my graphic novella entitled The Snow Queen Part I: The Mirror.
In the spring of 2009, I began to explore my passion for illustrative and narrative work through photography. Still intrigued by the theme of good and evil and the concept that neither seems to exist without the other… every good story has to have a problem and every character an adversary. I decided to translate this concept into an image, using the colors black and white as symbols of innocence and corruption.
During the summer of 2009, I created my first “fairy tale” photographs, drawing inspiration from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Excited by the results and loaded with new ideas, I decided to create more images like these for a final project in Fall Quarter of 2009.
Working solely in the studio Winter Quarter of 2010, I experimented with bringing a narrative style into portraiture. I felt as if much of my recent work lacked an emotional quality. Although the work had the illustrative quality I envisioned, the images felt passive to me. Therefore, more recently, I have been interested in portraying drama and pathos in my work.
So now I am back to the question. Why fairy tales? In one way I believe it is a form of escapism for me. It is almost cathartic to create images and scenes from one’s imagination. It makes them seem more real, more alive. Professor Jack Zipes of Minnesota University articulates in When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition,
” Ultimately we want to be told that we can become kings and queens, or lords of our own destinies. We remember wonder tales and fairy tales to keep our sense of wonderment alive and to nurture our hope that we can seize possibilities and opportunities to transform ourselves and our worlds.”
I believe it is this sense of wonderment that attracts so many to the tales and stories. Television, film, the performing arts… so much of our culture has been saturated by these stories. Yet not all fairy tales begin with “once upon a time” and “happily ever after”. Jack Zips refers to those tales that do as “wonder tales,” which were oral stories told in a tradition that predates the modern literary fairy tale (or what began as the cont de fee in France during the eighteenth century). I am most interested in the literary fairy tale, particularly in those which do not fit the canonical mold of the “wonder tale”. For many fairy tales, from Grimm’s to Andersen’s, contain characters that undergo real human strife and struggle, elements that receive less attention than the predictable “happily ever afters”. This realness amidst the enchantment is what makes me believe in the fairy tale’s magic… the story becomes a part of my imagination. As Jack Zipes explains. ” The worlds portrayed by the best of our fairy tales are like magic spells of enchantment that actually free us…they arouse our imagination and compel us to realize how we can fight terror and cunningly insert ourselves into our daily struggles, turning the course of the world’s events in our favor.”
As I look ahead to this project, I am looking forward to exploring the characters and themes in literary fairy tales. The drama, emotion, and enchantment is what I am after; and if I can inspire someone to “fight terror and…[turn] the course of the world’s events in [their] favor,” then all the better!
Source(s): Zipes, Jack. When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. New York: Routledge, 2007.
