Bonekeeper
In the heart of the forest,
where light barely reaches,
lives the Bonekeeper.
She walks the twilight woods,
a collector of fragments of what once was -
small skulls, weathered bones,
a flower long since wilted.
Some say she was born from shadow and soil,
a lost soul claimed by the forest's heart.
But in truth, she is both and neither -
a guardian of nature's endless cycle.
She is the silent keeper of these tales,
stories of life's quiet endings
and beauty in the ephemeral.
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This series centers on a forest entity who acts as a kind of archivist for the things nature sheds — bones, remnants, small pale fragments of things that have already lived their lives. She keeps them in glass vessels, not as trophies but almost as devotional objects, somewhere between a field specimen and a small shrine.
I wanted the framing to feel like care rather than collection for its own sake. Nothing here is meant to read as morbid or final — the bones are still part of something ongoing, still circulating through the ecosystem in some form. The Victorian naturalist references (the jars, the classification-adjacent styling) are there on purpose, paired against a more contemporary dark fairy tale mood. Both impulses — the scientific urge to catalog and the folkloric urge to mythologize — are really doing the same thing: trying to make sense of endings by turning them into something ongoing.
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Shot entirely on Kodak Gold 200, which gave me the warmth I needed to offset the stark white of the bones against the deep green of the forest understory. Natural backlighting through the canopy created a soft rim glow on the glass jars and along the model's contours, without needing any additional lighting setup.
I shot most of this at wide apertures, which did two things — created a shallow depth of field to keep attention on the specimens themselves, and produced a natural vignette from the surrounding foliage falling out of focus. Post-processing stayed minimal on purpose: protecting the highlights on the bone material, keeping the greens subdued rather than boosted, and letting Gold 200's native warmth carry the tone instead of adding anything artificial on top of it.
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Model | Maria Palmer
HMUA | Francesca Garippo -
Fuzz Magazine (2025)
