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Animals With Kids The Earth

Transfixed And Transfigured

THE POWER OF NATURE TO SHIFT OUR PERSPECTIVE

by Christopher Fotheringham | Photography by Peter Brodbeck

Can we still find the space to enjoy our time in nature without suffering the melancholy of impermanence? A Segmento photographer takes us through a joyful dream sequence to explore the possibility.

This series of images, with their jarring juxtapositions of a natural setting and glamour shots, is a cheeky nod to the incongruity that can exist between our image-obsessed consumer society and the natural world that surrounds us in keeping with the theme of this issue. The photograph chosen for the cover features model Federica Cosino in a red gown walking through a tree-lined dry river bed in the Shire of Murrindindi in rural Victoria as if lost on the way to a gala event. The series was conceived as representing a strange dream with all the uncanny costume changes, chance encounters, and unusual settings we experience in the course of our nocturnal subconscious wanderings.

She poses as if to mirror the branches of the mighty trees surrounding her. The image speaks of our insignificance in the face of nature but our ingenuity in creating things of beauty nonetheless. Her surroundings take her in: the dappled light, the riot of autumn colors, and the rustle of the breeze transport her to a place of primal sensuality. There is a sense of utter peace.

In another image, in an uncanny reversal of Odysseus coming upon the bathing maids, Federica, in her dream, now angelic and smiling beneficently, bathed in white light and dressed in a more natural white gown, comes across a pair of overall-clad rustics raking up the autumn leaves.

She is then transformed into an idealized country girl with an outfit to match. She eases into the environment and finds a spot to rest in the shade of a majestic gum tree seated on its enormous roots. The final image is her apotheosis. Once again in her angelic form, she makes eye contact with the viewer for the first time, inviting us to join her in her dream as the autumn leaves fall around her, consuming the foreground and presaging a spiritual metamorphosis.

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