30 modern Ophelias with narrative ambition

Stemming from my fascination with Ophelia’s most famous painting (Ophelia, 1851, by the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais), in 2014 I began photographing women drowned in water. My obsession was to capture the precise moment of death — the final breath — as represented in Millais’s painting. To move away from the macabre nature of death and elevate the beauty of women transformed, against their will, into eternal sleeping beauties.

Another guideline I set for myself was to contemporize the character, allowing both the context and the figure to speak of the twentieth one century.

Ophelia, the character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is naïve and obedient, at the mercy of everything that happens around her, with no power of decision. She inspires sadness and compassion. It is said that her death is one of the most poetic in all of literature.