Days Of Childhood Glee

“Days of childhood glee,
Do you still remember?
Nowhere have I seen
Shadows disappear
Ever since then.”

_{[ Fade – Theatre of Tragedy ]}

It’s 2016 and I first joined deviantART and started taking photos in 2006: later this year, in October, it will be ten years of GothicNarcissus. I thought it would be nice to celebrate that by publishing once a month a tribute photograph to the artists who brought me to this website and made me realise I had something to tell with my photographs, and here is the fifth one. I have written a blog entry about this little project.

Among the first Deviants I came across ten years ago before I even joined deviantArt was Amanda Keeys, aka kittynn. True, the first things I saw were her older, more gothic self-portraits such as Nightfall or Ophelia Drowns on random websites, but by the time I joined the community she had moved on to take brighter, more colourful photos of her children. I added her to my watch her expecting more of the former, but when I kept getting the latter instead I was totally fascinated by her work.
When I first started taking photos too, I had just started exploring gothic aesthetics in my everyday life too and was quite strict about that in my works: if I didn’t have some sombre-looking background, then I would go on desaturating and contrasting, or putting a texture on it, or trying to chunk some spikes and chains in the outfit, and so on. I think I already started finding that a bit constricting after little time, and it was seeing Amanda’s work, just how much emotion she could convey with bright, colourful pictures, that helped me allow myself to not be afraid to go out in broad sunlight and shoot such photos as You Learn About It: I did have my choker to keep the gothness in place, but there were bright colours and strong light and to hell with the funerary mood. Even though it took me another four years – two mostly “modelling” and two actually shooting gothic boys and girls – before I fully accepted colour and light into my work, it was Amanda’s work that planted the seed.
Now, as the photos she submits on dA mostly focus on small animals, BJ dolls, and notably her children, I thought it would be fitting to keep this tribute for May, the month in which we celebrate Mother’s Day in Italy. Also, I knew my mother, DamaInNero, would be coming over for my birthday, so I could work with her on this photo and make it a family matter in my own way. We chose to wait for the sun to start setting to get a warmer light and, of course, I brought along Ludwig, my BJ Doll, to join the shooting and tribute that part of Amanda’s photography too. And so, here we are.

Photo: DamaInNero
Concept, editing, model, styling, hair: GothicNarcissus Photography
Ludwig was customised by SleepingLiar (La Coterie de la Lune)