Happy accidents are always welcome in art! This little bitty was the result of me messing around with my new camera, a Sony Alpha a300. The self-timer was left on and it took several images in quick succession while I rearranged some furniture.

This image is kind of funny for me to look at now. I wanted to rest of the set to present a vaguely visualized woman who can serve as the any-woman, a stand in for the interchangeable female characters in the works I have studied who perish under the gazes of their male partners. Apparently, it takes an accident for me to achieve the look I want.

Here’s to learning how to use your equipment!

For Joelle.

At this point, I hope that the average viewer would realize that he or she is being placed into the role of a psychotic male, obsessed with a woman who is more an object of study than of love. Egaeus, the narrator of the short story “Berenice,” admits that he does not love his cousin/bride, even though he decides to marry her. His mental illness and past trauma forces him to distance himself from Berenice. Once his monomania sets it, she is forever transformed in his mind because of the degenerating physical effects of her disease.

I would imagine that this still represents the kind of probing view regarded to a woman like Berenice. She is less of a person and more of an idea to be analyzed and figured out.

Besides crafting and learning how to use a DSLR camera, I also learned how to do my own make-up…as long as I want to look like I am dying from Tuberculosis. This look was achieved with a heavy-handed application of the lightest concealer I could find and some thoughtful strokes of purple and blue eyeshadow. My make-up artist friend was unavailable, it is prom season after all, so I experimented with different looks myself and sought out help from YouTube tutorials.

Poe’s women never had a way out of the mad world of their creator unless it was at the hand of their men. Life, death, and everything that lay in between was determined by a man.

What if she could make her own exit, on her own accord?

This was, by far, the hardest image to capture because of the lighting. My apartment is cavelike in the early morning hours and I found myself waking up earlier and earlier to get the lighting right. Also, my mother and grandmother claim the kitchen in the mornings, so I had to shoot this ninja style.

I got lucky on the fifth day. No flash required. It was slightly overcast, yet sunny enough that the right amount of light could stream in through the kitchen window. I was originally seated in the other images, but decided on the third or fourth day that I wanted to change up the pose.

This is significant because being seated was a passive action that relented to the power of the male overseeing my subject’s day to day descent into illness. Jumping out the window is explicitly active, threatening male power and challenging the male gaze.

How could I attempt to put together a Poe-inspired photo series without including a mouth shot??? One of the most valuable take-aways from this yearlong project has been my renewed interest in Poe and the discovery of new works. “Berenice” has easily become one of my favorite short stories because of the sheer absurdity of the crime. A madman rips out the hypnotic teeth of his dying bride.

Upon reading the story, I imagined that Berenice would become slightly put off by Egeus’ disturbed gaze strongly fixed on her mouth. This image could have been pulled straight out of Egeus’ mind, as if he wished to probe her mouth and investigate the smile that ignited his monomaniacal fit.

This was taken around the third or fourth day of shooting, before all the corpse make-up made me break out. My younger brother, who initially expressed interest in helping me with this project, hesitatingly agreed to take part.

This image and the one that directly follows, ending this set, act as the unspoken and unseen events at the end of “Berenice.” In the short story, Berenice falls into a seizure and is believed to have died. Then. the narration picks up again an indiscernible amount of time later with Egaeus in the library, vaguely aware that he has done something.

It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight, and I was well aware, that since the setting of the sun, Berenice had been interred. But of that dreary period which intervened I had no positive, at least no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with horror—horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in vain; while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed—what was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered me,—”what was it?”

Readers never really find out what “it” was. Instead, it is revealed the servants were called over to the grave by the horrific screams of a young woman. They find her writhing body shrouded and disfigured.

My version of this scene is very gritty and close to home, literally.

An interesting obstacle to face when adapting a work of literature for visual art is that certain details are left out. This is where the artist can intervene and create their own variations on the original without veering too far off.

The closing image of this series attempts to fill-in-the-blanks on the final and most intriguing scene of “Berenice.” One moment she is “dead” and the next she is found alive yet disfigured at her disturbed burial site. Being buried alive…a “corpse” exhumed by a madman…disturbing a grave and finding the body still breathes…ripping teeth out of the mouth of a screaming woman with a set of crude dental tools…

What did this scene look like? How would Egaeus have left Berenice’s now nearly dead body?

The only thing I would do differently in the future is play up the “disfigured” nature of Berenice’s injuries. I have already been looking up how to use Spirit Gum and other costume make-up to create a Glasgow grin. Who knows, but the madman probably wanted easy access to those “thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances.”