Twisted tales
Everyone knows a few fairy tales.
Cinderella loses her glass slipper and Prince Charming uses it to find her. The queen dupes Snow White into eating a poisonous apple, but a handsome prince wakes her from eternal sleep. Poor Rapunzel lets down her hair and a kind prince climbs into her prison tower to set her free.
For a recent assignment, Lawrence High School teacher Angelia Perkins challenged her advanced photography students to put a personal twist on a time-honored fairy tale and interpret it visually.
Austin Hall used his mother — instead of a young model — to portray Sleeping Beauty. He zeroed in on the part of the story where Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle. “I wasn’t sure what a spindle was,” he says, “so I used a needle.”
Elena Boeth chose a more obscure story from the journals of Gia Marie Carangi about a girl with golden hair. For a twist, she changed the girl’s hair color and set her images on Earth instead of Mars, where the original tale took place.
To enhance the image quality and give them a soft, fairy tale quality, the black and white film was extremely overprocessed and bleached, Perkins explains.