A Forest Idyll
When I was a child a favourite hobby amongst all little girls was collecting swap cards. These cards – the same size as a regular playing card – featured illustrations of all kinds of subjects, but most particularly of little girls and boys doing things (walking in the rain, throwing coins in a wishing well, collecting flowers, etc).
I had a large collection, and displayed my keepers in special albums, while those I was willing to trade were held together by a rubber band. Sometimes we would be willing to trade keepers if something really special came along.
She will use her formidable martial arts skills to fight off dragons and evil step-mothers, and also enormous thorns …
There was one card I particularly remembered, probably because of the excessively romantic imagery: a girl in a quintessentially 70s flowing dress and floppy hat, wandering through a forest carrying a basket of flowers and a large key. I wonder what the key was for? Perhaps she is going to rescue the long-lost prince who has been fast asleep for a hundred years, locked up in his dungeon tower. She will use her formidable martial arts skills to fight off dragons and evil step-mothers, and also enormous thorns that threaten to tear her dress.
A while back I went hunting online and miraculously found the picture on Flickr! Inspired, I decided to recreate it as a photograph for SNAP.
Original 70s swapcard by the Valentine Publishing Co
Making the Picture
The production process has taken a couple of years. I photographed the backdrop at the bottom of a street I stayed in, on holiday in Noosa, Queensland, a couple of years ago. This was no forest, but rather a little copse of native trees and birches, and the ground was covered in ivy and little white flowers.
Some time later I found the enormous vintage 70s cartwheel hat at Etsy store Archetype Vintage. I’d long had an ambition to own the biggest cartwheel hat I could (because why not?), and when I saw that one, I knew it fit the bill. It was so large the postage doubled the price, and I asked the seller to put it on layaway for me. She told me later that she had subsequently received many requests of people petitioning, begging, pleading to buy the hat, or failing that (in the case of a famous New York bridal magazine) could they borrow it just for a photo shoot please?
I kept a lookout for a suitable dress until one hot summer’s day last year when I saw my friend Sapphire (who has kindly modelled for me many times before) wearing a romantic, flowing blue and white dress. It was perfect. I borrowed a large antique copper key (I had to enlarge and elongate it for the picture) and a flower basket from the Props department from the theatre I work in, and bought some native eucalyptus and purple statice to load the basket up with.
Yesterday we photographed it (‘look pensive’, I directed Sapphire), and today the forest idyll comes to life.
The original unretouched photograph – you can see the street in the background