"10 stages of life"

This project is my most recent, yet I have been working on it for almost 10 years. Researching and working on artistic angels to describe and show my thoughts of the way the modern world regards spirituality and sexuality. This project is spread between 10 photographs. All photographs were not edited or manipulated except for the B/W filter used in the post production. I chose 10 photos as the metric system is the most accurate mathematical description of the universe in my eyes. Each photograph in its position and subject describes a different metric stage in the evolution and de-evolution of the human stage of mental and spiritual degradation in the modern era - from birth to death. From innocence to betrayal of the self and soul. The Photographs Explained: 1. "Reflection Pool" - This first photograph describes the initial pre-birth stage of life: Innocent, pure, almost invisible. Naked and bare, soft and delicate, as "the spirit of God hovered upon the water" in the initial chapter of the book of Genesis. 2. "Life After the Thorns" – This second photograph reflects the break from innocence. It is a second paragraph to the 10-stage design of the project. It is an allegory for the falling of man from God's grace. The same as the breasts are the model for femininity, the cancer which seeps through our lives in our detachment from spirituality in our falling is conveyed via the remaining scar after the cancer is battelled. The rose signifies the desire for purity alongside the disease. 3. "The Bright Trinity" – this third photograph in the series signifies our daily look at the feminine. Free, lit, soft, and yet – somewhat sexual and seductive. It is the bright Yin, overlooking the following part in the series "The Dark Trinity". 4. "The Dark Trinity" – this forth photograph is the Yang in the feminine look on life. The darker, more inclusive dark desires embalmed in the female form – the seductive, controlling side of the feminine existence. 5. "Deadpool" – is the fifth photograph allegorizing the control of the dark feminine form over all society. The "Witch", the "Temptress", the "Goddess". All bodies underneath are subdued to its power. With the fall from grace, the feminine gains its power through sexuality, while at the same time subdued to society's rules. 6. "The Angelus" – the sixth photograph in the series, is my quote on Dali, Van Gogh and Millet comes with the usage of the "prayer of the devotee", to show the rise of the religious mind-frame in the human society, which leads to what I see today as the "decadence of the spirit". 7. "The Divine Trinity" – my seventh photograph in the series, is a combination of both my cultures, as I spent my life between the Jewish Israel and Catholic Ireland. The combination of the Holy Trinity and the Shekinah (The female spirit of God in the Jewish tradition) within the naked bodies wrapped in the traditional Jewish prayer wear (pre Christianity) in my eyes comes to symbolize the encapsulation and entrapment of the female within the religious world. This is where the female becomes "lesser" in the eyes of the religious, where sexuality is forbidden, where the nude body that was pure and simple in the first stage of existence is turned into the "devilish" form and transformed into a taboo (progressed in the next photograph of the series). 8. "The Reaper" – my eighth photograph in the series is the temptress, the killer, the female form at its harshest. It is a strong and deadly female, draped in white between two windows, yet in the slight shade. It is the "girl next door" you will not bring home to mother – she is the wanton who would break you down and bring you to your knees, and all because of all it went through in its history (allegorized in its preceding photographs). 9. "Trinity Lost" is my ninth photograph / chapter in the series, signifying the blindness of mankind, loss of sexuality in the world, as the same nature the naked innocence was formed so beautiful by the creator in the first photograph, it is now hidden, covered, blinded, ashamed in the same natural surroundings as within it was firstly formed, leading to its demise in the last photograph. 10. "Shekinah" – is my last photograph in the series. Shechinah, or Schechinah (Biblical Hebrew: שכינה‎‎), is the English transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning "dwelling" or "settling" and denotes the dwelling or settling of the divine presence of God, which is the female form in the Hebrew language. This term does not occur in the Bible, and is from rabbinic literature – the same literature which on the one hand reveres the female spirit of God, yet brings the feminine existence in the religious Jewish life down to the facility of a simple child barring good wife, who's place is in the home and has no apparent voice. The female spirit is both grand and terrible, terrifying and sexual, beautiful and dark. It is the first and final essence of our existence and after death, like the Viking Valkyrie – will carry us away to the netherworld. It is the death of innocence, the end of the circle, and maybe the bringer of future change, should it decide to reenact its original stage of creation in rebirth of the human mindset.