Everyone has moments of transformation. Part of the magic of those moments is their seeming spontaneity. Though the groundwork for them is often laid well ahead of time, the path is not always obvious in the moment. 

In real life, I was starting the day's barn chores when this image first appeared to me. I was in an exquisitely dark place. For better or worse, often both, that is a much-frequented place in my story. In my mind, in the dark, I walked past room after room of debt. Room after room of heaviness and emptiness, and weariness. Though a familiar hallway, it was excruciating to pass all those weighty doors. So I didn't. I stopped. And sat. And mewled over my weaknesses. I lamented their existence, and their entrapment. Some were handed to me before I knew what they were, and some I created myself out of protection. Each was a box, holding its latch closed for a ransom no one could pay. Dumbstruck by the stagnation of immobility, I understood the agony in the rolled eyes of tragic Renaissance paintings. As I sat, I contemplated the future I most deeply desired but could only see in my mind, not in the real world. Even if I saw that future come to pass, I knew that things would not get easier. Indeed, negotiating life would only get far, far more difficult. How other beings escaped this space to live a life of motion was unfathomable. An unsolvable mystery. That future was utterly unattainable for someone like me. 

A woman appeared before me, plainly dressed as an early American pioneer, with a hard face. It was winter for her, and she was feeding her horses, just as I was in that moment in real life. I felt her strength and resolve in defiance of the cold wind and snow and ice. She was living my imagined life, and some of the worst of it, at that. She knew life's darkness, and she moved within it, using her very burdens to create the strength to carry them. 

She was who I needed to be.

Something small shifted in me. When existing in darkness, even the smallest light is visible. In fact, only when there is darkness can light truly be experienced. Within every problem lies its solution.

How it was done:

When I went to create this image, I didn't have much of a plan. I knew I wanted to feature my chest, as that's where I feel the most restricted, and I had a small wooden box with an unusual latch on it. My studio this time was a two-foot-square spot next to a window in my office. I hung a black backdrop on the armoire behind me, and a white card opposite the window. The light from the window was pretty strong, so I hung a sheer reflector in front of it to bring the light down a bit.

I photographed myself and the box in various ways, starting with trying to recreate my vision. This pose was not the original idea, but I was drawn to it. Even while doing it, but especially in post. I hadn't planned to show so much of my body (or I would have worn pants!), but I wanted some options for cropping, as one never knows exactly what the final image needs to be. I spent a lot of time trying to make the original idea of darkness come to life, but it wouldn't. For various reasons, not all known to me at the time, all my attempts to make the original image of despair come to life resulted in the image not settling down nicely for me. Only when I found myself looking up toward the light, and opened the latch, did the image reveal itself to me. The butterfly, originally photographed in 2015, found its way in first as a design element, and then to further the narrative of small change.

I used compositing and blending techniques I'd just recently learned. I'm quite proud of this image, and I feel it's the best photo of me so far in my lifetime. I'm happy with how my body looks, and there was almost no post-production to make it look that way. The only thing I really did was get rid of my farmer tan. :)