Spellbound
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow;
The storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.
- EMILY BRONTË
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This series is about twin sisters shot inside their own ancestral home, playing into this idea of them as guardians of the space — not quite alive to it, not quite gone from it either. The house itself is falling apart a little, which felt important. Worn brick, old chandeliers, that kind of faded grandeur where you can tell something used to be grander than it is now.
I put them in matching black chiffon gowns and handmade neckpieces to lean into a Victorian gothic feeling, but I didn't want it to read as costume. It's more about the weight of inheriting something — a house, a role, a duty — that isn't really yours to choose. The chandelier fragments throughout the series work almost like a second symbol: light getting broken apart and scattered, similar to how the sisters' identities get split and echoed through the space.
The Emily Brontë poem I paired with this felt right because it's about being bound to something you can't walk away from, even when everything around you is falling apart. That's the tone I wanted — not a ghost story exactly, more like two people stuck in a loop of obligation.
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I shot this on both Kodak Gold 200 and Polaroid 600, and let them do different jobs. Gold 200 picked up the warmth in the aged brick and held detail in the darker gothic wardrobe pieces, plus it handled the light coming through the stained glass windows well — that light was inconsistent and kind of moody, so I needed a film that wouldn't lose shadow detail.
Polaroid 600 did the opposite job. Its color shifts and slight imperfections gave certain frames a softer, more spectral quality, almost like a pause in the middle of the more detailed 35mm shots. I positioned the chandelier pieces to catch light differently across both formats — the 35mm caught sharp, prismatic detail, while the Polaroids turned those same refractions into something hazier and less defined. The interior lighting was the hardest part to work around, since stained glass and chandelier refraction don't behave consistently, so a lot of it came down to reading the room in the moment rather than relying on one exposure formula for the whole shoot.
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Models | Kayla Marie Shaw & Kelsey Lynn Shaw
HMUA | Katya Daniliuk
Stylist | Vesta Adomonyte -
Feroce Magazine (2016)
