Untold Fairytale

An Untold Fairytale is a performative photography series exploring motherhood, self-identification and femininity through playful self-portraits.

The sudden emigration wrenched me from the calm and comfortable life of a middle-aged architect into the one of an exile in a new land, where I turned to photography as a way of holding my family together, of inventing possibilities for new ways of existence.

I began constructing a private, fairy-tale world, which only my two daughters have access to. The world where the boundaries of possibility dissolve, identity, reality, and imagination become blurred, the feminine fantasyland sprung from the bedtime tales mothers weave for their children. We are playing with folk tales archetypes, haunted, mystical, grotesque, yet the characters and scenes do not replicate any existing stories, our fairytale is still untold.
My daughters and I grew up on old Russian fairytales, which are filled with mystery, often frightening, and saturated with the darker undercurrents of human nature. This dark mystery seems to linger in the edges of the project’s photographs, offering a spectral frame to the visual narrative. The deliberately unhidden elements of a makeshift, low-budget photo studio introduce a Barthesian “third meaning” into the series.

This work is my means of coping with the despondency and fear of emigration and an opportunity to share play with my daughters and leave them with lasting memories of the time we spent together during this difficult chapter of our lives.

"We are proud to present the Diploma Award to Mari Saxon, whose staged photography evokes a haunting visual narrative that oscillates between memory, performance, and inner myth.

Her series immerses us in carefully constructed domestic scenes where the theatrical and the surreal coexist. Through uncanny juxtapositions of body parts, ritual-like gestures, and painterly lighting, the photographs explore female identity, vulnerability, and the blurred line between reality and dream.

Thank you, Mari, for turning interiors into spaces of tension, transformation, and visual poetry."

____________________________________________________________________________________ Phodar Biennial

"Why do we create fantastical worlds in childhood? Childhood allows for our imaginations to thrive and as life gets more complicated we lose a lot of that magical thinking. As adults, we often become reconnected to those fantastical worlds after having children. An Untold Fairytale reclaims that imaginative space of identity-making. In this performative photography series, Mari Saxon constructs otherworldly, fairy tale–inspired scenes with her two daughters, using staged self-portraiture to explore motherhood, femininity, and the boundaries between reality and invention.
Emerging from the dislocation of emigration, the project transforms the domestic space into a site of collaborative storytelling and visual experimentation. Drawing on the darker themes of Russian folk traditions, Saxon’s constructed environments hold both a strange beauty and with a sense of unease."

________________________________________________________________ Aline Smithson, Lenscratch