A Rose for the Dead: Tragic Asylum 4

Steven Perdikis

Context and Background

The year is 2007. I’m in my second year of University. I am studying an Undergraduate Degree in Visual Art, and I’m taking a digital photography class. I am tasked with making a photo book. The theme is portraiture. These are those images.

An essay should accompany this body of work, I’m told. There should be a theme that ties it all together. I have no idea what, or who to use as a portrait subject; other than those surrounding me in my class. I’m interested in the imagery evoked by an enormous cohort of “Gothic Metal”, and I use this as my basis, with my visual style leading more to Romanticism than Goya.

As we’ll see throughout this series of images, however; there’s a bit of obvious darkness throughout! Each image is inspired by a single song.

Image 4: A Rose for the Dead

The band Theatre of Tragedy paved the background for this image, after their well known track A Rose for the Dead. It is a song about the beautification of death, and the romantic undertones of nothingness: “Enraptured by the timeless beauty of the shadowsphere / We two abide the overlooked time of the watch / make this cherished feast last / but until the new dawn ascendeth”.

It is also a song about rebirth. This image is pretty heavily manipulated, with the “wound” on the cheek generated entirely in Photoshop, layer by layer.

More About this image

Back to the D80, and back to Beth. This was shot on the same session as Interlunar Dreams; and there was barely any colour correction required. Natural light photography is glorious when it works out well – capturing a few billion photons over a few moments successfully has a certain magic to it.

This is one image that, if I were to reshoot today, I wouldn’t change very much.

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