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.