“Rumpelstiltskin” and “Bullies”

I met Mary Barczak (Deviantart site) while wandering around an abandoned Dallas trying to find food at 1am. It didn’t work out but she gave me her card then and I got to see her work during the review today. Most of her photography illustrates well known stories with the help of hand made paper masks.

She told me that, though she didn’t expect it, but since starting the project she ended up getting many requests for custom masks and ended up selling more of those than prints. I can understand that – the masks are damn cool – and although some of the images are quite nice looking (I particularly enjoy the white on whites of the Rumplestiltskin one above) – maskmaking is probably rarer skill than photography. As is often the case with fairy tale influenced work, I felt the best photographs were the ones with the least amount of anachronistic content – if I could recognize an article of clothing as a modern one, for example, it seemed slightly out of place. Same with the backgrounds – the less recognizable as an actual place the better.

Speaking of unexpected skills – the back of her portfolio consisted of painted illustrations like the one (badly, sorry) reproduced above. This was a very pleasant surprise (and knife to a gun fight jokes aside) probably a great thing to have at a portfolio review at a photography convention. It’s always great to see all the skills someone has at their command as a visual artist – and there is sometimes a little fatigue from looking at one particular form all day. Sometimes I do tire of talking about lenses, you know.

I wish I had taken time to jot down more notes about her illustration series, since she doesn’t have a full website yet, but I do know that she calls the species of that figure “Nones.” As is often the case, my favorite images were the ones that were not conceptually obvious, like the Bullies image above – the title helps the image flower.