Magic Realism with Samantha Everton

Samantha Everton has a certain way of making the world both vividly dreamlike and darkly inquisitive at the same time. Her pictures often look like visual riddles, some less obvious than others, but it's never fair to simply try and "figure out" these photographs. There often seems to be something being held back, as if another clue to her metaphore were lying just outside the frame of the photograph. Her psychadelic colors are complemented by shadowy interiors and those who occupy them who seem rather detached. Humans, in Everton's world, are apart of the pallette, are blended into the composition - the same attention is given to a person as is given to clothes, walls, lamps, etc. People become the surroundings in these photos - perhaps Everton's way of calling attention to people as a landscape, that living amongst the 6.7 billion other people in the world makes people a sort of environment that we all exist within and are apart of.

Grace Bauer

The Eye of the Beholder


by Grace Bauer


after Diane Arbus



All human beauty is
an aberration, a mirror
trick drawing us
into itself. Into what is not.


And what is desire? A lack
invented by belief,
a return to the thrill
of the unfamiliar we recognize
in an instant as ourselves.


I know this in sight.
In the click of a shutter
revealing the barely real.
Strip glamour of its thin
veneer and you find something
raw. Elegant. You find the part
in us we're all afraid of
staring straight in the face.


But I can't turn my back
or blink. I feel myself
connecting through captured light
to a darknss that beckons, a darkness
much less frightening than you fear.


My subjects appear calm
because they are. They compose
themselves before my lens
like hallucinations we have
all shared, metaphors that suspend
us between what we want
to be and what we become.


Try to picture yourself
beyond denial. Run your hands
across your average face,
your normal body. And tell me
how you differ from these
miracles that always make you
want to look away.



-from Bauer's book Beholding Eye 2006, CustomWords

Diane Arbus is the subject of the recent Nicole Kidman movie, Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

Click here for a sampling of Arbus' photos

King and Queen of a Senior Citizen's Dance, NYC 1970 by Diane Arbus

Oh, what a beautiful morning.....

These are all photos taken in and around my apartment. The red light in the first ones is what it really looks like at twilight because I have a pink shade over the window (came with the apartment), and it just creates these amazing lighting effects. These were really fun to take anyway.

All photographs taken by John Tilley, 2008