Nocturne
In the liminal space between dawn & dusk,
certainty disappears.
The fragile wings of a moth land gently
on her soft skin.
When the sun falls away,
they guide her through the dark,
Navigating the unseen
and back into the light.
Trusting, knowing.
she will find her way.
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Nocturne is built around a single idea — how you move through something when you can't see it clearly. The figure in this series isn't guided by sight; she's guided by contact, by wings landing gently against her skin, by a kind of trust that the light still exists even in the dark.
I chose fourteen moth and butterfly specimens from six continents specifically for their symbolic weight across different traditions — Greek, Malagasy, Amazonian, Hindu, Native American. The Madagascan Sunset Moth carries ancestral and architectural associations. The Pipevine Swallowtail is toxic, iridescent, disguised. The Eastern Tailed Blue is small, easy to overlook, but essential. Put together, they make an argument I wanted the whole series to carry: the things we associate with fragility are often the ones holding the oldest stories about survival.
Fragility, here, isn't weakness. It's a disguise. Structural color — the kind that gives these wings their shimmer without any actual pigment — felt like the right visual metaphor for that. Nothing about this series is soft in the sentimental sense. It's soft the way a threshold is soft, right before you cross it.
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Shot on Kodak Gold 200 and Revolog Streak. Gold 200 handled warmth, grain, and skin tone against the deep shadow throughout — it kept the organza and body soft and legible even in low light. Revolog Streak introduced unpredictable light disruptions across the frame — literal streaks and breaks that mirrored the instability of the transition I was trying to photograph. I couldn't control exactly where those streaks landed, which felt appropriate for a series about moving through darkness without a fixed path.
White organza was layered against a dark iridescent backdrop to create something closer to a threshold than a room — natural window light diffused through the fabric, functioning at different points like a veil, a cocoon, a wing. The backdrop itself reflected subtle shifts in color that echoed the structural iridescence of the actual specimens, so the environment and the subject were speaking the same visual language throughout.
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Model | Audrey Simper
Wardrobe | Laurel Guido
