Siren
From beneath the rocks, she emerges
fingertips pruned,
wrapped around the blue locks of her hair.
Breath filled with salted air,
she gazes seaward,
but lingers on the coastland.
Voice gentle as the quiet winds,
she calls out,
drawing eager fish to shore.
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This one came out of thinking about fairytales and myths more broadly, and specifically wanting to push back on the siren as femme fatale trope. Instead of danger and seduction, I wanted something more ambiguous — a figure caught between mortal and mythological, powerful but fragile at the same time, existing in tidal pools and among weathered rocks rather than luring anyone toward anything.
Shooting on two formats at once was intentional, not just practical. 35mm carries a kind of timelessness to it, while Polaroid feels immediate and intimate — almost like catching something mid-transformation before it can fully settle into a fixed image. That duality mirrors the siren herself: myth on one hand, something more real and present on the other. Starfish and weathered netting show up throughout as small symbolic anchors — fragile things that still hold their shape, tangled in something that was built to catch and hold.
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Shot on Kodak Gold 200 and expired Polaroid 600. Gold 200 handled the wider environmental shots — the interplay of sheer, wet fabric against natural coastal light, and the contrast between bright highlights on the beach and darker, wet rock textures. Because coastal light gets bright fast, I underexposed by about half a stop across the board to keep highlight detail intact without losing the shadows in the rocks.
Polaroid 600, being expired, added its own unpredictable color shifts on top of its usual immediate development — mostly used for closer, still-life-style compositions of arranged starfish and shells. The two films behaved differently with the wet fabric and netting throughout: 35mm picked up fine texture and detail, while Polaroid softened edges and leaned into a more dreamlike, unstable quality. Longer exposures let the coastal wind move the fabric naturally during the shot, creating soft blur without needing to fake it in post.
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Model Hanna Danecker
HMUA | Ellie Danecker
