I recently had a gothic themed shoot with Bill from BGPicture photography at Whorlton Castle near Stokesley. We decided to go for a gothic fairytale damsel-in-distress theme as the location provides lots of bars to reach through, windows to gaze longingly out of, and corners to hide in. It is for this reason that a number of the photos from this shoot were processed in black and white, to add to the theme of the shoot.
I’ve always liked the idea of the damsel-in-distress as a theme for a shoot, as I feel that it has a fetishistic submissive element, with the female subject awaiting rescue, and thus always creates a variety of interesting and evoking images. As we were shooting, Tennyson’s “Marianna” (or more properly, Shakespeare’s Marianna, who inspired Tennyson’s poem) kept on springing to mind, and although I wasn’t quite in a ‘moated grange,’ the lines of the poem kept springing to mind:
“‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'”
With that in mind, I leave you with the collection of images that can be found on pages 3 and 4 here:
