“Beauty is a precarious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well. Often it seems to me to be an evil flower of nothingness, or else the cry of the world as it dies, or a desperate, sumptuous prayer.” – Eugene Ionesco
“The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
I learned a lot editing these photos. Creating a matching set of images isn’t easy, and it’s a particularly interesting challenge when the photos are like these. They’re warm yet cold, crisp yet dreamy, pallid and wintery but with hot flushes…and they contain forbidden heavenly artefacts such as lens flare and dramatically blown out highlights. Is it winter or spring? Their strangeness meant they had that ‘wow’ factor straight out of camera. But upon editing, the complex tangle of contrasts had to be teased apart step by step in more ways than weren’t immediately obvious. I definitely had to come back to them at different stages; I would revisit an image I’d ‘finished’ before and think “what on earth was I thinking?”
With photography we attempt to make beauty static…
But beauty itself is a memento mori…
The eyes of the heart do not have eyelids…
Photos by Gerard Chillcott, styled and edited by me – January 2021.
This isn’t all! You will be eventually able to see rest of this set on my Patreon, including up to erotic nudes, over the coming weeks.
occasional Rebecculation speculations 