Looking at Moni’s photos is like stepping into a fairytale. She creates an exquisitely quaint dreamland, lit by milky sunlight and peppered with sunkissed greenery. These pictures look like snippets of a wonderful forest adventure, of jumping over streams and picking berries. Moni also has some beautifully simple self-portraits bathed in white light, marvellously capturing the texture of the hair and the delicate position of tentative fingers. I have always been mesmerised by the beauty of hands: the flexibility of the dexterous digits, the creases in the skin, the fumbling action of the fingers when they are unsure of themselves.

These pictures are all about the gorgeous intricacies of life. The light, the growth, the complex experience of a living organism. The world seeps in from all edges, vast and unwieldy and demanding attention. What I take from Moni’s photos is a sense of peace, a fundamental calm within the chaos of our world. They make me feel tiny, as if buzzing around with little wings, skimming puddles and resting on leaves, looking out shyly at the plane of vision with infant wonder as the dust dances around my rosy, peeking face.

Photography is, more often than not, the endeavour to capture and thus make sense of a dizzying world, and Moni does that well, and very sweetly, with these dreamy photos.

All photos taken from Moni’s Flickr.

Rosanna Jones is an experimental photographer heavily interested in portrait and fashion photography. Her darkroom fiddling, heavily applied to one particular photo series of hers, really brings her work into it’s own vast space and blows a heavy breath of liveliness into the images in question.

Her Darkroom series is dark and messy, just like life. Threads of human life, fraying at the edges, left in a damp attic for years to wither and crumble. Like a life abandoned or a life wrecked, the photos carry with them a curious narrative, not an explicit story, but a visceral sense of life and living and all the personal mysteries held within. The rich blacks and spooky grey tones render the pictures as if they were peeks into caves or wells, with secrets and complexities lurking deep inside them. The messy scratches and marks call up all those uncertain emotions we know so well; confusion, anxiety, fear. They bring to the surface of the images a sense of a life being slowly erased, an allegory for the effect of time and history on individuals: we will all fade, after a while.

Blurry, grainy realities and splodges of mystery fluids with double exposures creeping out from underneath give these photos a feeling of the occult, too. Her subjects seem lost in a bubbling ether of witchcraft and dark leaves, though even in their menacing surroundings their humanity seeps through inevitably, leaving an unstoppable imprint of themselves.

Photos via Cargo Collective.

It’s cold out and my right hand smells like sticky buns. I think I’ll do some relaxing painting this evening.

i wanna touch you