Virginia

Lynn with Swan

Sleeping Beauty

Fairy Princess

Images from Susan Worham's series Some Fox Trails in Virginia

The title comes from a book written by my father’s ancestor, to show the lineage of the Fox family in Virginia.  For my own purpose, it acts as a metaphorical map of the rediscovered paths of my childhood home.

At the age of 34, I came back to Virginia to care for my mother, who died shortly after my return.  As the last of my family passed, I turned my lens to old friends and their new families.  I photographed the house in which I grew up. The man that lives there now houses snakes in my father’s old office, and rests them in my old bedroom while he changes their cages.  I was terrified of snakes as a little girl.  My mom always promised that there were none in my room, and now that she is gone, there are.

These photographs are not meant to be purely autobiographical, but rather representations of how I view things, based on my experiences, and those of others.  My work has always been a metaphor for my own growing up, and the small deaths of childhood innocence that occur on the road to becoming an adult. -Susan Worsham

Veil

Mark of the Witch

The 1922 silent film, Häxan, or Witchcraft Through the Ages, is an inventive and rollicking history of witchcraft, by Danish director Benjamin Christensen. The film is structured in chapters like a book and imitates a documentary composed of Medieval engravings, animation, and live action sequences. Christensen illustrates the spells, potions, and often absurd legends of sorcery. He portrays the cruelty of the church in its relentless pursuit to root out evil, believed to be lurking, most often, in the female body. In the final chapters, witches are alined with 19th century patients of hysteria. The priest is replaced by the doctor as culture shifts from the church  to one devoted to science. In both cases, women are subject to the assaults of patriarchy against any indication of "odd" or "suspicious" behavior.

Häxan is hauntingly prescient in its depiction of torture. Christensen shows young and old women alike, cracking under the pressure of abuse to release a litany of falsehoods. He shows the hypocrisy and violence of the practice and demonstrates the fallacies inherent in "enhanced interrogation techniques." 

Häxan is a complex critical work, and a cinematic masterpiece due to Christensen's adept use of lighting, composition and imagery. He shifts fluidly through a range of visual techniques and relishes in the humor of the abject, as he illuminates the history of the witchcraft through his unique and compelling vision.

Monster

Utan titel, 1998, 70 x 68 cm

Asa & Peter, 2003, 45 x 70 cm

Utan titel, 2000, 80 x 70 cm

Images by photographer Susanna Hesselberg

Several of Hesselberg’s figures are women who are frozen in physically limiting positions. As such, the photographs can be read as feminist commentaries on the reality of women, but one can also find a corresponding interest in the existence of men – both sexes are staged in grotesque scenes, where humans seem to be at one with their surroundings, but at the same time in conflict with reality.  Characteristic for the photographs is Hesselberg’s staging of the state of humanity, marked by a physical limitation of the freedom of movement and of an emotional loneliness. 

from Peter Lav Photo Gallery

Jawbone

image from Nové Domácí Léčení, date unknown

Golden

Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson in the 1965 film Goldfinger.

Interior

Images from the series Tableau, 2004-2008 by Christian Hagemann