Snow White
© Sanne De WildeSanne De Wilde created portraits of Albinos for her series ‘Snow White.’ She states: “Like photographic material, people with albinism are light sensitive. Light leaves an irreversible imprint on their body. This whiteness that makes them stand out, when captured in an image, almost makes them dissolve, consumed by the light. Their eyes can hardly bear it. Nevertheless, they have the power to look back at us, the viewer, and embody a human mirror. They are a metaphor, a symbol for stereotypes. They magnify the erroneous idea of human weaknesses and physical fragility, but also that of an invincible strength. Touched by their breath-taking beauty, in this series, I try to create a powerful impression of this fragile snow white.”
Land of Saints
© Sanne De WildeIn 2019, Sanne De Wilde was invited to Monopoli, in Puglia, by the photography festival PhEST to document religious festivities under the theme “Religion and Myths.” Her journey led to a region where saints travel by sea, fireworks sanctify the night sky, and devotion is staged with theatrical precision.
She chose violet as a recurring colour — both filter and symbolic thread. Historically, purple dye was rare and costly, reserved for emperors, kings, and later bishops. In Christian iconography, it cloaks the Madonna. In Buddhism and Hinduism, it is associated with the crown chakra — transcendence and spiritual awakening. In colour psychology, violet evokes imagination and creativity. It became the chromatic bridge between holiness and mysticism, spectacle and introspection.
“Through photography, I am interested in how faith performs itself — how imagination takes physical form in fabric, smoke, fireworks, wax, water. Religion, like photography, constructs realities. Both depend on framing, repetition, and shared perception.
In these images, devotion is neither romanticised nor dismissed. It is observed as a living system — one that reveals how deeply humans need to gather around something larger than themselves, whether a saint or a story. If capitalism is sustained by belief in abstract value, religious ritual reminds us that there are other forms of wealth: consolation, spectacle, transcendence, hope.
Imagination is not an escape from reality. It is one of the forces that build it.”
IRL (In Real Life)
© Niccolo’ Rastrelli
IRL (In Real Life) is an ongoing photographic project that explores the identity and representation of Generation Z — the first to grow up in a world where real and digital life merge seamlessly, redefining boundaries, relationships, and forms of personal expression. Through a documentary and intimate approach, the project portrays young people within their most personal spaces — their bedrooms — juxtaposing these portraits with images taken from their smartphones: selfies, stories, posts, and screenshots that shape their online presence. Two visual worlds, one physical and one digital, intersect and overlap to authentically narrate the complexity of contemporary youth.Born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s, this generation uses images as a language — a tool for identity and belonging. IRL observes how, from Milan to Delhi, Nairobi to Buenos Aires, the same digital gestures and symbols have become a global code, while still reflecting different cultures, dreams, and contradictions.
The project’s ambition is to expand across all continents, building a visual archive capable of capturing both the universal and intimate dimensions of a connected generation. In the long term, IRL will evolve into a series of international exhibitions and a book — creating a space for dialogue between young people and adults, cultures and languages, the real and the virtual.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive.
The Art of Hollywood
© Julia Fullerton-Batten
2026
Before green screens.
Before pixels replaced paint.
There was an illusion, made by hand.
At a time when the movie industry is ruled by digital perfection, I turn my camera toward what came before: a Hollywood built on canvas, pigment, and the invisible labour of master painters who created entire worlds behind the actors.
I travelled to Los Angeles to stand before these monumental, long-forgotten backdrops, survivors of another era. Once central to cinematic storytelling, they now linger in silence. By entering these painted spaces, I reanimate them, staging new narratives that resonate with the films we thought we knew, yet remember only in fragments.
The Art of Hollywood is a return to the age of hand-painted film posters, images that promised everything in a single frame: love, danger, glamour, escape. Borrowing their visual language, I construct carefully choreographed scenes in which reality and illusion collapse into a single image.
This work is not a homage.
It is a confrontation.
A dialogue between analogue craftsmanship and contemporary vision.
Between memory and reinvention.
Hollywood, once painted.
Hollywood, remembered.
Hollywood, reimagined.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
Before green screens.
Before pixels replaced paint.
There was an illusion, made by hand.
At a time when the movie industry is ruled by digital perfection, I turn my camera toward what came before: a Hollywood built on canvas, pigment, and the invisible labour of master painters who created entire worlds behind the actors.
I travelled to Los Angeles to stand before these monumental, long-forgotten backdrops, survivors of another era. Once central to cinematic storytelling, they now linger in silence. By entering these painted spaces, I reanimate them, staging new narratives that resonate with the films we thought we knew, yet remember only in fragments.
The Art of Hollywood is a return to the age of hand-painted film posters, images that promised everything in a single frame: love, danger, glamour, escape. Borrowing their visual language, I construct carefully choreographed scenes in which reality and illusion collapse into a single image.
This work is not a homage.
It is a confrontation.
A dialogue between analogue craftsmanship and contemporary vision.
Between memory and reinvention.
Hollywood, once painted.
Hollywood, remembered.
Hollywood, reimagined.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
Land of Shuāngbāotāi — 双胞胎之乡
© Sanne De WildeThis collaborative photographic project by Sanne De Wilde and Bénédicte Kurzen explores the mythology of twinhood in China. It forms the second chapter of an ongoing body of work that investigates twinhood as a powerful metaphor for shared human experience, intercultural dialogue and collaboration.
The first chapter, set in Nigeria, titled Land of Ibeji, focused on the spiritual and cultural significance of twins in Yoruba society. Southwestern Nigeria has one of the highest twinning rates in the world, particularly among the Yoruba population. The term “Ibeji” — from the Yoruba language — means “double birth” and refers to the sacred, inseparable bond between twins. Ibeji figures are venerated as spiritual beings symbolising balance, protection, and prosperity.
In China, twins are referred to as “Shuang Bao Tai” (双胞胎), literally meaning “double embryo.” This chapter centres on Mojiang in Yunnan Province, a town internationally known for its high twinning rate and its annual Twin Festival. While the global average twinning rate is approximately 12–15 per 1,000 births (with identical twins occurring at roughly 3–4 per 1,000 births worldwide), Mojiang reports a significantly higher-than-average rate, though exact figures remain debated and scientifically unverified.
Local folklore attributes the phenomenon to the so-called “Twin Wells” located in the nearby village of Hexi (河西村), where the well water is believed to enhance fertility and increase the likelihood of twin births. The wells have become a cultural and tourist landmark. Newlyweds and hopeful parents visit the site seeking blessings for fertility and prosperity. During the era of the One-child policy, twins were legally exempt from the single-child restriction if born in the same pregnancy, which further fueled local fascination and pilgrimage to the wells.
Mojiang also hosts the annual Mojiang International Twins Festival, established in 2005, attracting twins from across China and abroad. The festival has positioned the town as a symbolic site of twin identity and cultural tourism.
To evoke the “magical” dimension embedded in local narratives, two colour filters are used in selected images. Purple references mythology, storytelling, and local associations with fertility — including Mojiang’s well-known purple rice and its geographic position near the Tropic of Cancer, often linked in local discourse to notions of special geomantic balance (feng shui). Blue refers to water as origin and life force, echoing the symbolic ‘Twin Wells’.
By weaving together folklore, demographics, tourism, reproductive politics, genetics, and identity, the mythology of twinhood becomes a lens through which broader themes emerge: state control versus personal freedom, science versus belief, cultural branding, and the economics of fertility. Duality operates on multiple levels: visible/invisible, material/spiritual, myth/science, individuality/collectivity.
Ultimately, this chapter — like the Nigerian one — asks what twins reveal about how societies project meaning onto biology, and how the figure of the double can become a site for reflection on coexistence and shared humanity.
The project approaches twinhood as a mythological and philosophical figure: a metaphor for duality within the self and in the world. The twin evokes the “other,” the mirror image, the shadow self — echoing archetypes that recur across cultures. Divine siblings such as Artemis and Apollo introduce a powerful feminine counterpart within twin cosmology. In Chinese mythology, the creator goddess Nüwa is often depicted intertwined with her counterpart Fuxi, their serpentine bodies forming a visual symbol of cosmic balance. In ancient Egypt, the enduring bond between Isis and Osiris embodies devotion, resurrection, and relational duality — a form of mirrored existence that extends beyond literal twinhood into metaphysical partnership.
Across cultures, twin figures embody balance and tension, fertility and fate, protection and rivalry. They become vessels through which societies project ideas about gender, lineage, cosmology, and identity.
Through symmetry, reflection, double exposure, portraiture, landscape, and still life, the work moves between documentary observation and a heightened visual language — with all effects created in-camera and on location. The process relies on optical interventions and lived encounters, allowing mythology and contemporary reality to coexist within the frame.
click to view the complete set of images in the archive
