During my second year of University, i had started to explore titles based on 'The Inventive Image', when i came across the ancient greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The version of the story that i decided to study was Black Orpheus by Marcel Camus (1959). After watching the film and studying other versions of the myth, i narrowed down my research and pulled out a singular quote, when Orpheus tries to contact the spirit of Eurydice after her sudden death. Orpheus shouts ‘Where are you, Eurydice’? And the spirit of Eurydice responds by saying, ‘I’m close to you Orpheus, do you love me enough to accept hearing me, without seeing me’?

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Eurydice was a simple country girl who escaped to a new city to hide from a mysterious man that was pursuing her. I have thought that perhaps this man was a manifestation of death, as he disappeared after the death of Eurydice. I wanted to incorporate a feeling of banishment of the character within my work, where the skeleton faced man and Eurydice become one.

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Throughout my creating and experimenting, I wanted to emit an aura of sadness and release of life and I did this by creating a sequence of death, spirit and afterlife. The death of Eurydice is shown in the first image where you can see a violent scream and uncomfortableness where the spirit is leaving the body and facing forward to expose the true fear and extinguishment of life. In the spirit of Eurydice, you can see a settling of the character and a more relaxed state where the material nature of the figure is profiled. And lastly in the angel of Eurydice the figure is showing a form of acceptance by turning her back on her life and entering the afterlife exposing an angel wing form on the back of her body. I wanted these images to be religious and delicate as well as dark and abstract and i managed to achieve this without any digital manipulation. I used a mixture of long exposure and a low ISO in a steam room, with my model wearing a white sheet. A slight camera shake and orange tungsten light gave me an array of different outcomes, as seen below.