TITLE: Spirits of Our Spirit
I captured the reflections of rocks and plants on a lake's mirror surface, then rotated the picture 90 degrees to reveal the kami, the Japanese nature spirits that protect the lake and our spirits. The pareidolia formed by these reflections create animistic spirits of our own minds, reminiscent of Salvador Dali's Swans Reflecting Elephants. They evoke primal totems and chimeras, and we interpret them like Rorschach tests. The lake's horizontal surface reminds us of the freedom of water and the absence of a vertical sense, allowing us to bring in our own vertical interpretation inspired by the lake's spirits. By the means of teh pareidolia, I explore how we project our own psyche onto the world around us. The reflections create pareidolic images that trigger our imagination and invite us to interpret them as symbols of our own inner world. These chimeras and totems that emerge from the water are not static, but constantly evolving with the seasons, reminding us of the impermanence of all things. They are true encounters ! As we gaze at these reflections, our eyes move from the global to the detail and back again, hypnotized by the ever-changing patterns. Each time we look, we discover new details and the totems, primal and primitive, become more complex, with chimeras piled upon or inside each other. It's as if we're witnessing the birth of a new animistic spirit, evolving and transforming with the seasons and with our gaze. And yet, these spirits are ephemeral, disappearing with the melting of the snow, reminding us of the transience of life. But for the moment, they are alive, and our encounter with them is both magical and primal. NO PHOTOSHOP .
AUTHOR: Giandra De Castro (France)
Giandra de Castro, born in 1971 in Brazil, is a self-taught photographer living and working in Paris for 37 years. From a very young age, she turned to music and writing and is a now published author and a singer or Brazilian music.
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Photography took over all other passions in 2018 when she became a Speaker for the Water, with a body of work exclusively created with Water as a companion. Her photographic work contains aesthetics found in paintings.
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Through the fast shutter speed exposures and unexpected choices of framing, she uncovers hidden worlds and untold stories about old times: when the world was created (Cosmogony series), ancient and primitive worlds (series Chimeras & Totems, Primitives, Atlantida), forgotten worlds and worlds-in-progress (series Drafting)
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Giandra dedicates hundreds of hours to each series in order to combine the right states of water, the right state of weather, the right state of Nature or People, none of those parameters being under her control because no photography is staged.
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All pictures of all series are aimed at stimulating imagination and our creativity. She then celebrates the creative power of both water and humans, as the observer takes a great part in finishing creating the picture with his own interpretations. Water here is the support of a personal oracle, and each time one finds a personal answer to the question “what is it?” he speaks outs the water he is made of.
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She also honors the capacity of Water to unify our world (water evaporates here and reins elsewhere), and to unify what human concepts set apart and separate in silos. The horizontal surface of water erases the borders between Up and Dow, Under and Above, reality and reflections, reality and dreams.
This echoes the work of French Philosopher Gaston Bachelard : Essay of Water & Dreams
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Giandra captures with no special effect during the click (no double exposure, no long exposure…) and editing is limited to color, sharpness, resizing, with nothing added and nothing removed.
She likes unique pictures, unpredictable and unrepeatable.
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The aesthetic of Giandra work has raised attention since 2019 when she started going public with her work. Since June 2019 she is exhibiting in France and abroad during festivals and collective exhibitions.
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