52 Weeks of Dark Art: A Journey Through Fine Art Photography
Welcome to my descent into the surreal.
As part of the Sony Alpha Female 52 Week Challenge, guided by the visionary Brooke Shaden, I am conjuring one image each week alongside fifty-two haunting visual poems woven from fragments of dream and decay. This ongoing series merges fine art photography, dark art, and digital compositing to explore themes of transformation, solitude, and the eerie beauty that lies just beneath the surface.
Each piece begins with a frame, captured on digital or 35mm film, then reborn through meticulous photo manipulation in Adobe Photoshop, where texture, light, and shadow collide. This is more than a challenge; it’s a ritual. A reclamation of forgotten selves. A conversation between past and present mediums.
Follow my journey as I blur the lines between reality and reverie, where every image tells a story, and every shadow hides a secret.
Week 1: The Beginning - Out of the Ashes
When someone you love dies, the world doesn't heal - it breaks differently.
They tell you "time will make it better," but time only teaches you how to carry it.
Grief is a second birth: clawing through ash, breathing smoke, standing on scorched ground.
You rise, not whole, but altered — a life remade around absence, stitched from the remnants of what was.
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Week 2: Red — Paint the Roses Red
We cut flowers from their roots, watch them wither, and call it comfort.
Grief makes us do strange things — clutching beauty that’s already dying in our hands.
When he was alive, he brought her red roses, his favorite.
She loved yellow best, but it made her smile to see him happy.
Love is sacrifice stitched with thorns — and in the end, we are left holding stems that bleed.
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Week 3: Light: Light a Candle
Grief presses us into the earth, a silent, endless weight.
We reach for anything — anything — that might let us breathe.
I was raised Catholic, once taught that death meant lighting a candle,
setting a small fire against the endless dark,
letting it burn until the wick surrendered on its own.
I don’t believe in gods anymore, but still, I believe in flame.
In our home, my husband and I have built an altar —
a shelter of memories —
photographs, relics, pieces of faith that once held our loved ones steady.
We light candles for them, not because we expect salvation,
but because the light still speaks.
Because sometimes, in the trembling glow,
we remember how to carry the weight.
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Week 4: Fantasy: Portal to What Was
A gentle brush of a hand, a soft hug, a long conversation.
The little things, often overlooked.
Small moments passing us by as the clock ticks on.
Moments we will long for when the bell tolls.
If only we could go back. If only there was a portal to what was.
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Week 5: Portraiture: Memento Mori
Remember you must die —
Crisp and sharp, the stillness will capture us all.
In life we move and stir — blurred by the speed of it all.
We race to do something, to mean something.
Way back when, the living posed with the dead.
Propped up and still as they starred off into the distance.
Empty eyes, stiff and cold to the touch.
Photographs were rarely captured in life — in death they wanted to remember.
When faced with mortality we are fearful.
One day we must die but today we survive.
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Week 6: Favourite Book: Peregrine
What comes first, the image or the words?
Words don’t come easy for me but images, they flood my brain.
Rushing my mind like a cinema reel.
Calling out to me to bring them to life.
Ransom Riggs find photos, relics of the past and weaves them into a story.
Creating a magic world trapped in time where differences are magic.
Enoch can breathe life into the dead, if only for a moment.
Millard walks around, unseen.
And Emma floats above them all, lighter than air itself.
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Week 7: Childhood: Lucid
Dreams now forgotten, once visceral.
Melded and sculpted, a universe created by a developing mind.
Gliding around the room, weightless, looking down at others as they slumber.
As days shorten and responsibilities grow, we long for the ability to control the magic, to spread our wings and fly.
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Week 8: Twins/Multiplicity: Growing in the Shadows
Peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese, salt and pepper, bonded for life, in pairs until the end.
The same yet different, complementing one another. A close bond the sharpest knife can’t sever.
Where does that leave us without a match? Ripped open and empty inside, longing for someone to fill the hole.
Sunflowers grow best together but what of those without a mate, no seedling to help us sprout?
We are left alone to grow in the shadow of the pair.
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Week 9: Documentary: Stones to Dust
The sands pile up — one grain at a time.
We mourn those who we’ve lost, documenting their lives with a stone.
Stones, that will crumble to sands, centuries past.
Blowing in the wind — marking the passing of moments gone.
They reach out to us, reminding us of who they were.
Even after all they knew turned to dust.