A young woman in a straw hat stands in the middle of a huge hall, so high that her head almost touches the beamed ceiling. She holds her phone in her hand and gazes fascinated at the world around her. Surrounding her is a narrow balustrade on which figures in magnificent Spanish costumes quietly parade past. These people are strangely small - to her knee at most - as if from another scale.
She points her camera at them like you would photograph a giraffe or flamingo in a zoo. Not mocking, but marvelling. The hall feels simultaneously real and unreal, as if she has stepped into a dream. Everything seems perfectly to scale, except for herself. It is as if she has accidentally entered a carefully decorated living doll's house and is now the intruder herself.
The scene exudes a magical realism, as if time and logic have been momentarily abandoned here. "Alice in Wonderland" is therefore the perfect title: a world where nothing is right, and precisely because of this, everything is possible. A place where looking turns into wandering, and where the small suddenly feels much bigger than yourself.
My name is Saskia Nelissen, I live and work in Rijswijk and in May 2010 I started my own company in Visual Communication, Kasias Photo Art.
Kasias is involved in special projects in the field of photography, image editing and graphic design.
I also teach Photoshop and Lightroom courses..
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