One photograph is a fluke, and the photographer is a purveyor of flukes.

When I first started out in photography, I would think that I was not a real photographer because I felt like each of my images was a ‘fluke’. A fluke that I didn’t feel I knew, fully, how I actually achieved. In terms of lighting, posing, compositing – everything would feel almost arbitrary, especially as I was on both sides of the lens making self-portraits, often composing the shots blind. I would wait for the dawning of each ‘fluke’ feeling frustrated for all the substandard shots in between that gave me the nagging feeling that I wasn’t a real artist.

Sedimental: A picture we shot in 1 minute…
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

I’ve learnt that this feeling is actually the normal mentality of an artist (whether or not I was a real ‘photographer’ in the most physical professional sense was more down to whether I made money from photography.) But I began to realise that to be an artist, you just have to create art, irrespective of how great or not it might seem to others. From day one of creating art, we are ‘artists’. My thoughts have since evolved to entertain the notion that all photography is somewhat about flukes, about luck and chance, and I refer to all genres of photography. Before this comment is taken as dismissive of skill and talent, I will explain what I mean. Some genres involve more luck than others; for example, shooting the perfect image of a bird of prey is about timing, waiting, being able to capture the bird in the right place in the frame, in position, in focus: and that bit of luck in getting the shot. So whilst luck is only part of the recipe, the only things – the research and the patience – don’t necessary stand alone as the qualification of being a photographer. So the notion of what ‘photography’ actually is comes really down to experience, the constant repetition of a set of skills and traits – and imagination.

The adrenalin: …a picture we set up for 5 hours.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
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In a different photography genre, for example, in tableaux photography that is set up and contrived for camera, the images might bend more in the post-production, to gradually meet the artist’s full vision, at leisure – like a painting. But for every photograph in existence, the sum total of its subject(s), its setting, mood, story are not all down to the photographer’s doing. Nothing really belongs to the photographer or is unique to them, or completely under their control. The person photographed by a street photographer for example, is their own self, styled themselves, choosing their pose of their own accord, within their setting. In fashion photography, there is creative input from stylists, from assistants; the models’ poses from a familiar cultural dictionary of body language copied from images seen before, with the photographer shooting them also with a multitude of iconography in their mind that they have ever visually experienced.

Contemplation: made with a butterfly shot in the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle. I nearly didn’t go to the museum, as I wanted to take a nap instead. So many of my images from this shoot would otherwise have been a different story.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
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Then there are all the unexpected things that happen during a shoot (any type of shoot) that the photographer will recount: when the burst of natural light came, or the model pulled a brilliant expression, a person accidentally entered the frame, and all the bits and pieces that fell into place that went toward the making of one picture. I could think of one unexpected quality for every one of my images. Everyone should be able to think of several random – strong or subtle – inspirations or references that goes into every one of their images. Even though a lot of my work is self-portraiture, featuring myself as the model whom I myself ‘style’, I felt even more than usual a force in action that would power my ‘flukes’ – if anything, I had to rely on flukes more.

Of course, it is the eye and skill of the person capturing and creating that makes the ‘photographer’. Whether the photograph is of a scene that had no interception from the hand of the photographer, or a set-up completely designed by them or another designer, it is the act of observation, angle and timing. It is the chemical reaction, between the subject and the camera, that constitutes the photographer’s mark. Even the photographer training on a workshop shooting a ready-made set-up has the opportunity to be creative. In the time they are given to direct, there emerges a window in which can be identified, even in its barest slither in a context otherwise devised by someone else, the creative input by that photographer.

One good picture does not make a ‘photographer’. All those things we associate with a good photographer: skill, or talent, or eye, can’t be faithfully conveyed in one single picture. It can give an overview, but not a conviction. Being a photographer is about capturing and creating images again, and again, and again; the ongoing functionality of production – both as a ‘photographer’ and as an ‘artist’. The persistence, the repetition, the accumulation of lots of those ‘flukes’ is the photographer’s real accolade. The measure is in their repeated persistence of making images happen: whether they are a wildlife, fashion, art photographer. It is someone who constantly instigates situations to shoot in.

The escape: The images for this were shot reluctantly on large JPEG when we ran out of memory card space after rowing out from our cabin to the other side of the lake.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

And this is why I’ve always sensed something I didn’t quite like about photography competitions. The idea of being judged for one photograph actually means very little. Of course, some competitions invite small series of images for submission – but generally, it is one concept, epitomised by one image, that they are seeking. And it makes sense – after all, the judges are looking for as straightforward a task as possible, having to sift through possibly thousands of entries.

In rewarding one picture, we are congratulating a photographer on merely one ‘fluke’ they have experienced, on one single effort they may have exerted to produce one image, that is questionable as to how much input was given from other people, and that in itself gives no indication as to whether the person really should be congratulated, esteemed, and rewarded as a ‘photographer’.

Her fleeting imprint: Shot in a heavily-guarded abandoned mental asylum we managed to get into during its last few weeks before being demolished.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

Humans want it easy. Humans want to simplify. Humans want to compare one thing with another one thing, and make a conclusion about which is better. So in photo competitions, it makes sense that we want to look at one picture, react to one picture, and congratulate that photographer often on the basis of a pigeonhole into which we have placed them. We don’t want to have to look at a person’s numerous bodies of work, to understand their ever-evolving desires, to understand their mind and their intentions – even if we did that, the unique make-up that we discover in each person’s lifetime of work would become too mind-boggling to be able to sit it beside someone else’s work and state who should win a prize.

Storm Door: Shooting this without any idea I would add ships, I was going to close the door, but casually dismissed it.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
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I am not saying photography competitions are bad or should not exist, or that I have never entered one, or will never enter one again. They can be very valuable experiences on which to hinge and market ourselves, and it is precisely that: being aware of their over-simplification and what they really are about. First, your work must stand a chance of randomly catching the attention of the judge within that one split second when they first flick through all of the entries, and if for whatever arbitrary reason your image does not connect with them in that time, place and split second, your submission was futile. On the other extreme, even if your picture goes on to win the competition, it is not your picture, not the way you contextualised it as part of your series or your body of work – it’s a picture that has been re-appropriated by the judge in their specific time, place and taste – it becomes theirs, it’s their choice of representation of the competition. What/who they pick will always be on their terms. And though the rewards (prizes, awards, exposure) may be great – and worth shunning all of this philosophical drivel I’ve written – deep down, the winning of a competition doesn’t prove anything about your photography, your abilities, the profundity of your work as a whole. It only proves that people enjoy that one ‘fluke’ you orchestrated, and decided to give you something in return, and to accept you into their circle, at least temporarily.

I speak particularly of those competitions that do not ask for anything specific, opening up a whole range of categories for submission, where the criteria is even more blurred. I have opened up photography magazines where a spread of readers’ pictures are displayed, everything from penguins to naked ladies, and wondered what I’m supposed to think as I look from one isolated diverse picture to the next.

Handbreak: The cars and tyre tracks in the Dubai desert were not ideal on first glance, but then became part of a Gulliver-esque narrative.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
Please visit All photographs are flukes: the problem with photography competitions for the full size image.

I think photography becomes a lot more interesting and meaningful when we actually take the time to appreciate an artist’s wider body of work and read about their background and their process, how they manage the unexpected alongside the orchestrated, how they go on to make another picture, another and another (which is exactly why I enjoy Camera Obscura, for the time it devotes to every artist’s piece – and the diversity with which different artists talk about their work). What makes an artist/photographer is their continued strain of creations, the gaps between their pictures as well as the pictures themselves, and their refusal to accept the non-existence of originality by restlessly remixing their inspirations in their own way.

Parasite: Originating from an outtake of me stooping over in a field, along with an outtake of the wood.
© Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela
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For more photos please visit Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela website and her facebook page.

Text and photos by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

First I will describe how Ecology began (which was roughly in November 2010). For a while previous, I had wanted to bring environmental topics into my work, but did not know how to do so without feeling like I was forcing some undesirably didactic quality into my images. Instead, I waited until it felt right and instinctive. It began roughly at the time when I shot Free range (below). I was compelled to shoot in the atmospheric winter Kent landscape, along with a bin and some rubbish I’d brought along to anchor the desolate feel of an outdoor nude. Unusually, I also chose to openly display the brand name of the supermarket bag. Posing for my own picture, and not being able to see exactly what the pose looked like till afterwards, I was fascinated by the distortion of one of the shots in-camera. The strange hole in the curve of my neck and shoulder made the top of my body reminiscent of a hollow carcass. The final image I presented, along with the title I gave it, started to suggest a new, more topical level of dialogue than the fantasy realm evoked by a lot of my work up to then. The work to follow varied in tone, but overall it set the precedent for a new angle.

Free range
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

In continuing to act upon this new environmental inspiration, I listed some problematic aspects of our modern existence. For example, our overuse of plastic and packaging in general, imminent oil and water depletion, the littering of the landscape both on a personal and mass-industrial scale, the reliance of man on medicine and our drug-reliant medical system (the latter which has become my focal/‘favourite’ topic that I am always craving opportunities to express). Pictures like Midway by Chris Jordan spelled out the starkness of contamination of the planet and inspired me to want to present this kind of juxtaposition in my own portrait/nude tableaux.

I went on to casually gather unlikely props and materials, centred around waste, plastic, domestic objects and banal functional items. Some props were brought from home, such as rubbish, cling film or items of clothing. Some props I bought with purpose, such as an inflatable fish; others I found more haphazardly on my wanderings, such as traffic cones, decaying boats, an old broken television set. Gyre falls, below, was a pivotal image in my early days on this series where I started to see how nudity and waste could co-exist with an otherwise beautiful or graceful pose.

Gyre falls
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

It was a tricky early-morning shoot that I felt clumsy doing, but the plastic took on a silvery, water-like appearance and in its symbolism, literally moved along the current of the series’ direction. This picture became a personal ‘benchmark’ to look back on at times when I became doubtful that nudity combined with waste was not an overly ambitious coalition. The contrapuntal placement of fashion models amongst flies and pig heads in the images of my longstanding inspiration Guy Bourdin has inspired me to believe that sensuality or beauty can sit alongside bizarreness and surrealism.

Because of the nature of shooting nudes outdoors, a lot of images have come to be shot with varying levels of collaboration from my partner Matthew. Heatstroke is one of our favourites: one of the most ‘collaborative’. I had posed nude in the cool damp ferns wearing all but a faux-fur coat; and later Matthew had shot long exposures of the car taillights through the mist. The moment in post-production happened when I was literally about to close down the set of images and conclude I hadn’t anything fruitful (at least, the ‘thing’ that I was looking for at the time evaded me).

Heatstroke
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Suddenly, joining the long exposure with the picture of me posing, a forest catastrophe was born: a strange darkening scene that spelled the end… where humanity sits on ravaged land holding onto its last lavish possession. As for most of my images, I thought long and hard about the title: it had to encompass the ambiguity of the strip of ‘fire’, whilst also inferring something more personal or even sensual in the way the woman poses, stripped of everything but the fur, which has in turn been symbolically ‘stripped’ from an animal. The title comes to acknowledge the ephemeral and yet essential quality of natural human desire, whilst at the same time envisioning the synthetic chemical heat sent through the heart of nature by the activities of humankind.

iv/tv
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

IV-TV moves onto referencing technology, in a forest scene where the posing figure is foetal, as if being birthed from the smoking, toxic waste of the empty television set, or escaping from it. At the time of making this image I was also aware of a symbolic reference to our rituals of childbirth and the tethering of woman to machine in the standard Western approach. The picture and title became suggestive of many threads of thought that come from the binding of humanity with technology. In The divorce, below, I was also inferring a link to medicine although this is on a more connotative level. There is a ‘disconnection’ between mind and body, but it is subtly noticed, just as it is overlooked or unacknowledged by so many of us that live by the particular (symptom-led, rather than cause-led) health system Western medicine dictates as normal.

The divorce
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

An important aspect in my series is in welcoming ambiguity. There is not a definitive ‘it’ intended for everyone to ‘get’. The topical issues that inspire me are heartfelt and serious, but rather than submitting to some singular message that suggests how we should live, I started with a sense of futility of ‘doing anything’; the message was more about brooding, about inwardly reflecting, taking as much righteous ‘message’ from the image as you wish, in the manner of a private religion. Later however, I began to write words with my images to actively spur people into thinking about undesirable topics. Paltry, below, is an example of an image where I was inclined to comment on our tendency as a human race to ‘bury our heads in the sand’, and the body become a meat chop, a slab or a commodified object, rather than a living respiring instrument.

Paltry
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Throughout this series, I’ve experienced a desire to inject a little bit more preparation into my normal spontaneous approach, but still letting the ingredients come together organically whilst shooting (especially if I’m shooting myself, and can’t see and frame myself like I can with another model). In musing over ideas, I started trying to do some sketches, but found that I prefer to write down words. The selection and editing will then be another part of the journey and discovery. The titles I add to the images are a helpful way of both directing the viewer towards the meaning(s) I have in mind, but also remaining aloof (to acknowledge there is always more than one meaning) often with something mystical sounding, or words that could be a pun. Sometimes the idea for the title comes before the making of the image, as with While stocks last.

While stocks last
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Moored
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Above is Moored, shot in Dungeness, an inherently dystopian town on the coast of Kent. This is one of the few of the series so far that uses colour dramatically and vibrantly, but by way of juxtaposition with the morbid element. Otherwise, quite a few of my images in Ecology have become black and white pieces. There is something quieter and yet sometimes more powerful about black and white. There is something that often really suits the nude in the landscape, to be devoid of colour. I am clearly not alone in this thinking, as I am just one of many artists who have fallen into lust with the synergy between nude and monochrome. Somehow, by taking away the colour of a nude in nature, the connection to the banality of reality becomes severed. The image will sometimes remind me of analogue photography, as in Caesura and Denuded.

Caesura
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Denuded
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I have fond memories of shooting Denuded. Matthew and I had wandered Ashdown Forest and I was looking for a suitable fallen tree. We came across one that was half buried in the shrubbery and looked like an elephant’s trunk. I toppled backwards naked in the misty cool air, whilst we looked both ways for any hikers. It was as if time had stopped around us whilst we got the pictures done. It was Matthew who first suggested converting to black and white, and when I did so, I was compelled to keep it like that. The drama of the scene looked equally good in colour as in black and white: it is probably the only image yet that I display both in colour and in monochrome. Although the monochrome lacks the detail of the green moss and fern texture, the nude shape sits delicately, yet clearly outlined, like a faceless shored fish propped in a sea of leaves.

It is finished
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I use whatever I can find in the outdoor location to help make contrasts, concepts and shapes. It is finished, above, was shot with direct light from the sun that burst through the clouds for all but a moment (with help from Matthew, who concentrated on timing the light for the shots whilst I worked on pose). There is a palpable Biblical inspiration in the image and the title, as in the image below also, which was shot with another model in an apocalyptic-looking orchard. I like the idea of a curious dichotomy where Eden meets Gethsemane; the line is blurred between Eve and Jesus on the cross… the utopia of Genesis joins the dystopia of the book of Revelations.

Stay awake and watch
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Many of my images take on an organic surreal evolution post-shooting. My current favourite piece in Ecology would have to be The Fourth Soil, shot only this year (January 2012). It also takes on a Biblical allusion in the title, which references a parable. I posed for Matthew to shoot me standing at a distance amongst the trees with a 85mm f1.2 lens we were using for the first time. I was inspired to create black and white images but did not plan for surrealism. I never usually plan for surrealism, actually, because it has to feel ‘right’ to me, in front of my eyes, there has to be a magic that just arrives at the point of execution.

The Fourth Soil
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
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I was moving the figures around the forest scene afterwards on the computer and saw a synergy between the truncated thighs and the saplings. It was exciting to see, in particular, the way the trees ‘clicked’ with the bodies for the first, third and fourth figures. The other two were added to complete the line, and the composition took shape. The frame was left wide to keep in all of the texture and detail of the mystical forest scene, dwarfing the figures with its vastness. It was a picture quite like no other in my portfolio, and those moments I love as much as when I create images that ‘fit in.’ Another important aspect of a black and white image, for me, is that the image often becomes ‘illustrative’-looking. Whilst some of my favourite colour pieces may be reminiscent of (and inspired by) paintings, my black-and-white images are instead often like drawings. I find it reminiscent of illustrations in books from my childhood, particular in this case the illustrations I remember in books by C.S. Lewis. Even in the shots before the surreal stages, there was a quality to the scene that I loved for its intriguingly charcoal-like appearance.

Parasite, below, was forged from the same fire as The Fourth Soil, in that the shots were from the same shoot and place, a shot of the forest by itself, and one of me crouching in a field. As I transformed and toyed with the body, I liked the interesting resemblance it had to the anatomy of a flea when rotated stomach-down. It called to mind the interesting notion of ‘the human parasite’, and when I shared it online, I invited viewers to write their comments that I would select and add around the ‘flea’, in the manner of an anatomical chart.

Parasite
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

In some images I feel that the nudity beckons a more sexual dialogue than others. The dialogue can be seen to nudge away from the environmental, back to the personal, but in another respect, the sexual and environmental can be taken together as a combined theme. I felt this way when I made The invasion (below). Alongside this image, instead of writing something to direct the viewer’s interpretation, I listed an outflow of suggested readings:

“an optical illusion; the opening of an ants’ nest; a solar system of encroaching planets; a cluster of spacecraft; a rash of infection; a synthetic/disrupted sexuality, attacking the body; a self-destruction that has been planted within; a dystopian Nyotaimori (‘body sushi’); a surreal form of censorship.”

In doing so, I allowed my imagination to explore how the genitalia of the figure literally becomes the landscape on which a dystopian narrative takes place.

The invasion
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

To conclude, the Ecology series has involved ‘stripping’ down, that is: myself as the model, literally in frequent nudes; the colour of the image, often down to the tones of monochrome or sometimes just with low-key lighting. And also, focusing more on the simple mood and atmosphere of the shot, often keeping a shot as a simpler nude ‘study’ or appending surreal layers that come about naturally like the layers of an onion. In the process, it has built another direction: new ways to show my ever-present inspirations (from Bourdin to the Bible), new ways in which I interact with my audience, and a new conceptual dialogue and approach to what I write with the images. Corkscrew, below, is the most recent image I created to date as part of this series. Monochrome was a natural choice for the muted tones of the pavement on which it was shot, and the surrealism was a wild lovechild of (half-reluctant) curiosity, and intentional desire to inject a distorted eroticism into a series that so far has been toying with the boundaries between personal and environmental. It suggests an evolution of Ecology, or perhaps the dawning of a new series.

Corkscrew
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

My aim within the next year is to round up the most cohesive set of images from Ecology for exhibition and also for a dedicated hardback book. Still, I will continue on to see where Ecology takes me.

This is the third and last article of a series of three essays by Natalie Dybisz:

1. Intro: Undoing the illusion
2. Falling back down to earth: recovering from “Levitation”
3. Model behaviour: the story of Linda
4. Stripped: a fallen body of work

For more informations and photos, please visit Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela website.

Moult
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Text and photos by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

I recently shot a model like no model I have ever shot before. Her stage name is Linda. She was one of the six models we hired for a fashion shoot in London.

I hired her as ‘the blonde’ of the group. She was the first of the set to be confirmed. She looked satisfactorily attractive, pleasant and serene. She turned out to exceed all expectation, wildly.

Perfectly, she was appointed by the stylist to wear a catsuit on the day. This was fate. It was worth not having met this model for so long (I’d had her bookmarked for months) for her to wear this outfit, in this way, on this day. A catsuit that would allow her to move in a manner a dress would never even see; more poses than I’d ever seen a model able to do before, even upon its in-built, heeled wedges. Checking her reflection in the mirror and stretching out of the styling room in a way I found amusing, I didn’t realise her gymnastic potential though I started to see quickly how confident she was to display it.

We started in a cluttered corner with an overly-bright flash, but drew away to play exclusively with a couple of very appropriate pommel horses, over which she instantly started leaning, laying, doing the splits, and then, whilst I was tweaking my camera settings, springing up and hanging from the bars over the room.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Model behaviour: the story of Linda, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I was rather taken aback. I changed tact. I suddenly felt as if I was shooting wildlife. This was all about capturing her. I turned off the flash and switched to my 85mm lens to shoot with natural light: her sitting, splaying, hanging, with boundless energy. The wide open aperture isolated this cartoon of a woman in her element.

When I work on a shoot, I never quite know what I’m doing. There is a perpetual gap between intent and outcome that I’ve learnt to embrace. I just try to make sure the elements I like in the shot are allowed to have a chance to feature in varying different ways, and the ostensible distractions or things I don’t like so much can be reduced: the two opposing forces drawing in slowly, as the shoot meanders, that’s if I even get an idea of the attractions or distractions. I considered how to accommodate what is required for one of my ‘surreal fashion’ composites: I shot tilts up and down to make potential wide photomerges for weird workings. I dragged in props upon which I painfully pondered. But Linda was moving quickly, quickly even over the lamp heads I placed at the feet of the pommel horse, and ideas shot past like cars on the motorway, with me standing in the central reservation wondering which one to chase after. So I just shot, and shot what I could. Sometimes I missed a pose from changing a lens or moving an object. I did not like the idea of blur but it was brought upon some images in a way that anchored the moment.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Model behaviour: the story of Linda, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

The shoot turned out to be quite like no other I’ve done. On reviewing the images afterwards I realised this was not about transforming the shots into composited surrealism. She herself was surreal. She herself was, and is, a spectacle, a walking illusion. The pictures are not to be chopped and changed and contrived. The model herself commands something else. A model that powerful redefined the purpose of the shoot. My purpose was to record her, to immortalise her in pixels, and not to mess too much afterwards with what is ‘happening’ in the image. I deepened the tones, enriched the curves to meet the flamboyance of her own curves; exaggerated the warm beige hue in a slightly comic-book aesthetic, and stitched together images for a panoramic view of some scenes. But airbrushing seemed… sacrilegious. Maybe she was already too close to a hyperbolic, hourglass perfect. At least, for these images, there was a line that said – do not cross.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Model behaviour: the story of Linda, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Almost every picture of her became a valuable piece of evidence of that shell-shocking hour with her. It was like reviewing a series of shots of a fledgling star, the redolent pages of a book displaying candid pictures of people of legend. Every imperfection: every blur, blemish and bulge, became part of the story. Looking at the images was literally like having the privilege to keep looking at her unfathomably acrobatic, sultry performance.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Model behaviour: the story of Linda, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I felt wonderfully lucky to have discovered someone whose performance fed my creativity to an extent that made me want to arrange another shoot with her as soon as I could. As a model for my own self-portraits, I felt (inevitably) slightly sapped of enthusiasm at the prospect of posing for myself again, when I had her form etched in my mind, as well as in the folders on my laptop where I had over 50 images of her marked out. This was not just the thrill of shooting a flexible model (I’ve always wanted to shoot a dancer in motion) but the combination of suppleness with sassiness, as a recipe for pictures to blow the mind. Even pictures of the most photogenic models can be duly demanding of exaggeration. Most models do as they ask, some try to contribute with learned poses, and others excel to the point where they literally throw a confetti of ideas and inspiration over a speechless, overwhelmed photographer, standing like a child on Christmas morning.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Model behaviour: the story of Linda, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I am used to the stunning model who is, literally, stunned. I have never been quite satisfied with a candid picture of that stunned, stunning model as a single display of interest. For me, there is usually always a gap that demands to be filled – the gap of reality, that needs filling in with the polyseal of Photoshop, to mask the slip of self-conscious expressions or just the plain static semblance of even the most ‘professional’ model. Fancy tableaux of Carrollesque collage are my current forte within fashion photos. And the times when I’m not completely embellishing my photos, are times when a magic moment in the shooting has come, that glimmering unicorn of the ever sought-after feeling of visual completion without desire for compositing. With Linda however, I felt showered with magical moments. It was rare, a rare cat sighting, when I felt compelled to candidly capture so many moments in an otherwise contrived set-up.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Model behaviour: the story of Linda, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I saw the photoshoot in a different way than I am usually inclined. The choice of images was still key to making the sequence work: selection and editing were still important to the mystique of representing Linda, but it was like being given a new set of instruments to play. I look over at my Surreal Fashion series in comparison to this story, and see highly contrived elements scaffolded round a model who performs satisfactorily stiffly, for one stand-alone piece: an ornament, to be made further ornamental with additions of craziness in Photoshop. They are pretty, they are perfect, they are made even more perfect and bizarre. But Linda is a different animal. She is her own bizarre perfection, moving over objects with the stealth of a lynx, very sexy and very photogenic – but much more. She makes all eyes male. She is a force that you can only try and picture as quick as you can, and treasure the evidence, counting down till you get to shoot her again.

Model Linda Silverstone. Outfit/accessories by Susana Bettencourt, styling by StyleCreative. Make-up by Safiya Laviniere, hairstyling by Linnea Nordberg.

This is the second article of a series of three essays by Natalie Dybisz:

1. Intro: Undoing the illusion
2. Falling back down to earth: recovering from “Levitation”
3. Model behaviour: the story of Linda
4. Stripped: a fallen body of work

For more informations and photos, please visit Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela website.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Model behaviour: the story of Linda, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Text and photos by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

I can still recall the excitement I felt when I first saw a ‘levitation’ image. It brought to mind Victorian trick photos of women’s bodies floating under the hands of black-clothed magicians, like case studies of psychoanalysis, Freudian symbols of female hysteria. I also thought of the magical worlds in children’s stories: The Neverending Story and Peter Pan, epitomised by images I admired like that of young photographer Chrissie White, where a girl hovers toward her bedroom window in a purplish night-time scene. It seemed like levitation was the most exciting thing you could make happen in a photograph, and all down to careful shooting and some fairly simple Photoshop compositing work afterwards.

Reverie
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

My own efforts began in 2008 in a hotel room with Reverie (above). From this I embarked on a series of images which culminated in The smothering (below), a self-portrait that has come to be my most popular both online and in physical exhibition, spread-eagled over the web and exhibited in multiple cities internationally. But it is this image that has in turn made me wonder critically about the whole ‘levitation’ concept itself. I’m almost glad that it’s nearly sold out as an edition print, because it comes to resemble a period in my photography, and angle to my work, that I’m somewhat inclined to airbrush away just like the hands around my ankles in Photoshop. Why is that?

The smothering
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Most people who view this picture ask ‘how’. Almost everyone who sees it asks how I made it. They may even open up a conversation, not with ‘how do you do’, but with ‘how did you do it?’ It hung at Photo LA where even the art buyers queried the process. The interest was based solely on its technique. To me, the ‘how’ in art is only interesting if I also hear the ‘why’; the two are inextricably linked and make the story behind any image. Technique by itself is the domain of photography ‘how to’ magazines, the Blue Peter-esque ‘here’s one I made earlier’ where the viewers are shown how to copy something, step by step, stroke for stroke, without thinking, without feeling; just doing, for the sake of it, like making papier-mâché Easter eggs.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I am fully aware of my role in promulgating the popularity of levitation, by my writing and presenting about the mechanics of its production. Of course, I am not the ‘pioneer’ of that or of any technique; I was in turn inspired by other sources and then participated in co-inspiring a new wave of others to ‘levitate’. I’ve presented on it at tradeshows, festivals and in talks, written about it in magazines and in my two books that grace bookstores worldwide, and done workshops specifically about levitation imagery on both sides of the Atlantic. I have chosen to do each of these things, primarily because I don’t think there is any ‘secret’ about the production: by showing the technique, I hoped I could demonstrate that it is all but a technique, to be used within a wider artistic process. Note the important difference between inspiration and imitation: the ‘inspiration’ artistry talks of should be that which is manifested by a feeling, not the urge to emulate an exact image or notion of the singular ‘idea’. And it’s the latter that inevitably occurs with levitation, which in its nature of eye-shocking immediacy, becomes all about the visual: a domain of DIY for anyone to try, and it’s the hyped herd’s tight focus on the mechanics alone that is unsettling. I can’t help but feel a knot in my stomach when I see a tutorial break down the ‘step by step’ on levitation, with my images cropped in on the action, straight down to the nitty gritty, like the ‘money shot’ in porn.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

The crux here is to highlight a nagging feeling I have about the nature of levitation images. When I went through my initial tricks phase (in 2008) I felt as if I could not make a picture unless it had levitation in it. Fair enough, all artists go through phases. It is utterly natural and an artist’s attraction to something is their instinctive way to create. I liked the fact that a series of trick images was forming under my eyes, all with floating, falling or hanging women; a tapestry of elevation that for me was personally inspired by the symptoms of anxiety and a sense of unease.

Sprung and The jitters
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

But in these photo-sharing times, where anyone can make a picture and then share it with the world (something I have to be thankful for in my own career), so has the technique of levitation flourished. The dominos started to fall: someone would see someone’s image and ape it, then someone would see their image and ape that; endlessly creditless like a gushing river intermingling water from unidentifiable sources: the trend heightened, and the levitation photos came. My images formed a trickle dropped from one source pool, in turn falling into another, helping move the flow of a popular but superficial technique.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

A tsunami of levitation came forth: a world of people laying across invisible tables and implied chairs, veiled by motion-blurred hair, peeping out from underneath textures, toppled backwards fossilised, reaching towards objects shot in another time and place; pictures that range from ‘jumping mid-air’ to a complete collage of electronically-sewn limbs. Compared to when I first saw a levitation photo, like any new thing I had not seen before such as HDR photography, I gaze at levitation like an adult might gaze blankly at porn, wondering back to how the novelty of such a sight would first enthral them. Whilst modern digital photography and the internet has opened up so many people’s expression of creativity, a side effect is that we end up seeing so much of something, its wears thin. The internet becomes a public pinboard of so many ‘magical’ pictures that the democracy by which the technique became proliferated dissipates the magic itself. I examine the proficiency of the Photoshop handiwork like a miserable mistress in a tapestry class instead of feeling fascinated that such a surreal vision can be achieved with photographs at all.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I think back to my levitation phase, when I could think of nothing else but levitating, and almost sigh with relief that it’s passed. After all, once you do a levitation photo, after you make a subject float, after you apply the most seemingly astonishing thing you could put in a photograph, how on earth do you do a picture of someone, just sitting or standing, ever again? To be able to present any photo or series and ‘feel’ its power of communication, there has to be a conviction of its worth, and levitation jumps so high up the barometer it almost goes off the scale, like putting two spoons of sugar into your tea every day for a month and then trying to drink tea without it. By employing the richest, most hyperbolic, and fantastical vision, the notion of a normal photograph can become bland. Your photographic tastebuds can get burnt by that hot sweet tea, able to be satiated only by the strongest substance. And that is not to say there is anything inferior about fantasy, surrealism and magic realism; composited images continue to form my main vein of work. But levitation poured a substance so rich into my blood that it soon became hard to bear. The strongest surrealism employed for a portrait: that of human flight, leaves everything else crashing back down to earth with a resounding banality, diminishing appreciation for anything less than spectacular.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I personally find a lot of inspiration in paintings and illustrations, probably more than other photography. I am attracted to surrealism and pictorialism, and I have always embraced how heavily contrived works simply bear different values and production stories to more candid images. Whilst everyone has his or her own reason for wanting to make a levitation picture, I believe it is very difficult for levitation in particular to be done as part of a wider concept or message and not as an end in itself: it is too distracting. It is the message itself.

The adrenalin
© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

Whether the creator is aware or not, levitation is usually always instant gratification. The viewer doesn’t have to think when they look at it. In the way that modern media moves the mainstream to emotion over reason, we love levitation, because it doesn’t require much effort at all to enjoy the picture. No background dialogue, historical, political or otherwise is needed (part of what drew me to it), nothing necessarily poignant but the sweetest-stitched tableaux, the melodic notes of visual pop music. It is universal, communicating across culture and age, the obvious impossibility of defying gravity, which can be rendered by anyone with a camera and Photoshop: or even just a well-orchestrated jump. For the creator, things get tricky – so to speak – as life continues after the inevitably heightened response following their first ‘levitation’. The audience’s expectations of that creator become simplified. They want more of the same instant kick, that rich diet to which they’re becoming pleasantly adjusted. Anything other than levitation is a consolation prize. I have felt as though anything I did post-levitation phase was at risk of boring my online viewers, a hangover after a wild night out. They saw suggestions of levitation where there weren’t any, and they sometimes still do. I feel as though I have somehow truly ‘tricked’ them. Levitation left an odd aftertaste, a phantom presence in my work that I didn’t quite like.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I am a casualty of the levitation war with myself. I feel like I have had to re-teach myself appreciation of a photograph, a regular photograph. I had to soothe myself with the reminder that there are more purposes to photography than to instantly titillate, wow and melodramatise. That such thing as realism exists, and that finding surreal moments within the ‘real’ can often be more rewarding.
Of course, this is just about my own world, and my conflicts between desires for both manipulated and untouched pictures, a diversity that may not be so wide in the work of other people who have pleasantly levitated with less of a bump back to earth. Like an ex-alcoholic having the occasional tipple, I still sometimes create levitation-based imagery although they’re usually within a specific context. And in truth, I have seen photographers who have attended my levitation workshops go on to incorporate the technique successfully into commercial and fashion work. In my own personal work, I have wiped the palette clean and rebuilt new images upon it, introducing titbits of surrealism slowly back in, like a child’s rationed chocolates after teatime. That way I actually enjoy the pictorialist, surrealist treats more. It’s like stripping back your make-up routine so that it doesn’t take so long to wearily apply the make-up every day, and to not look so different with the make-up off at night. I can appreciate a photo again – and as ever, I love how it can develop into something else in Photoshop – but with subtleties, and new ‘tricks’, something that may even go unnoticed at first, or brew into a wild cocktail. Tricks that are enmeshed primarily in reality, some far more saccharine than others, and going back to the tea analogy, it’s fitting that I actually have no problem switching from sugary tea to sugarless tea in the same day.

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

I didn’t really think too much about the reader is supposed to take away from this article. It’s not rosey and pleasant and joyous. In a sense it’s the opposite, like pricking the balloons on the girl levitating above a cornfield and watching her tumble into a heap. One of the main challenges of looking at any photography is challenging oneself: to see things differently, to see it from another perspective. I seek a balanced diet in photography by trying to understand other people’s tastes – trying to view my own ‘taste’ objectively from time to time – and when I do happen across another person’s levitation photo, to see it through the vision of their own freshly excited eyes.

This is the first article of a series of three essays:

1. Intro: Undoing the illusion
2. Falling back down to earth: recovering from “Levitation”
3. Model behaviour: the story of Linda
4. Stripped: a fallen body of work

For more informations and photos, please visit Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela website.

Text and photos by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

The three essays to come were each written with a different motive, and they are all quite diverse stories. Collectively, their theme is to strip back the veils from my composited and often surrealist tableaux that are characteristic to my main body of work as a photographer and artist. In doing so they also serve to highlight the ultimate pleasures I continue to experience in creating intricately contrived work, the height of which is in one of my current working series that combines fashion and art in eclectic, collage-like scenes.

In a sense, these essays document the ‘hangovers’ from the rich visual party of my louder work. For in between all of the final images in a portfolio of highly ‘constructed’ images are many dissatisfied unfinished pieces, and for whatever reason they are unfinished, at least some can serve to reveal a self-imposed pressure from its creator to produce a ‘series’ or keep to a ‘style’, or simply to meet one’s own expectations set by previous shooting experiences. It is at these times that I value being able to fall back onto ‘negative space’ literally, to re-sensitise myself.

Of course, all photography and indeed all art is contrived, so in undoing one illusion, we peel back a layer to reveal more illusions. This is about recounting different experiences in making a decision between methods of making one illusion and another, all ultimately about feeling – about trying to feel again something that may have been lost through an overdone routine. I will give only a glimpse here into the essays’ content:

Essay one: falling back down to earth

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Undoing the Illusion: a series of three essays, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

If I had to point to one image that defines the amount of success in photography I have had thus far, it would probably have to be my image The Smothering which comes to define the topic of my first essay. The essay looks across a series of work of mine, and a technique that characterises it, that of ‘levitation’ photography. It explores how, from my personal angle, creating this kind of imagery challenged, excited, but also eventually complicated my approach to artmaking. The essay develops the idea of the photographer having a ‘diet’ and a taste that can be overpowered by certain forays into techniques. The essay is a story, but a story that happens over a year or two, given meaning by looking in retrospect over that time.

Read Falling back down to earth: recovering from “levitation”, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

Essay two: model behaviour

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Undoing the Illusion: a series of three essays, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

The second essay is about one single shoot. Contrasted to the first essay, which was written long and hard over a few days, this was whimsically penned (or rather, typed) immediately following the shoot it describes, literally soaking up the sensory experience before the language drifted away from my mind. The shoot had a way of taking me by surprise and challenged my set approach. As humans we want simplicity, we like patterns and plans, but how refreshing it can be to go with the spirit of something outside of ourselves – especially when I am used to taking so many self-portraits. In this case, the subject is that spirit; a model redefines the purpose of the shoot.

Read Model behaviour: the story of Linda, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

Essay three: stripped

© Miss Aniela (Natalie Dybisz)
Please visit Undoing the Illusion: a series of three essays, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela for the full size image.

The third essay takes on select pieces from a recent series of mine that has, in essence, taken on the pleasures of candidness and minimalism, in favour of an adapted new language. However, the series is not strictly one way or another, and the series has highlighted to me the times when compositing for contrived effect, in either subtle or epic amounts, becomes necessary or desirable. The sense of ‘stripping back’ in this series is typified by use of black and white, nudity, and barren shorn landscapes which became a personal trend fitting to its intended ‘dystopian’ mood, slowing the tempo from my other work. Conceptual intent plays a bigger role than in my other work; it is a resting place for inner troubles felt about the world – a place for them to be expressed visually – even if the intent falls off track and gets lost in digressive beauty or strangeness along the way.

Read Stripped: a fallen body of work, by Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela.

For more informations and photos, please visit Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela website.