Parts of The Earth Images featured in Spanish publication by Erika Masterson

The translation is a bit off as it was originally in Spanish. But feel honored to be compared with photographers of the twentieth Century and the super models of that era…The woman and the stuffed animal: a photographic fashion deathlessErika Masterson meets girls and taxidermy, a type of photography that was popular in the early twentieth centurySHAREBYVIRGINIA MENDOZADECEMBER 22, 2015PHOTOGRAPHphotographamazing-portraits-of-young-girls-with-taxidermy-animalsby-erika-masterson-photographic-artist-13__700Erika Masterson found a stuffed pheasant in an antique shop in Florida. Wearing obsessed with what remains when the living die time. So was the pheasant and portrayed his niece with him, as did the Victorian photographers when photographing kids with dead animals. Because yes, the postmortem photograph was also extended to dogs, cats and birds. Erika was not based on this type of photography to begin your project ‘Parts of the Earth’. But the fact is that the Victorian fashion and had dazzled as much as taxidermy. So in his portraits, the protagonists pose with stuffed animals, nineteenth-century dress clothes.The picture of the girl with pheasant achieved the top positions in various photographic competitions. So Erika wondered if this would not be motivated by something. Life and death were spinning in his head and photographer began searching collectors of stuffed animals. When a client commissioned a portrait, she knew that her husband was an amateur taxidermy and could lend some animals to your photos, which earned him to continue what was already an ongoing project. After that, he came up with another collector who loaned eight stuffed animals.His search ended in Miami. “In a shop selling taxidermy ‘Art by God’, let me go to take pictures for a day”, tells Yorokobu. For her, that was like a day in paradise, while acknowledging that things were not so easy. “It was a difficult project to do, not only in finding the animals, but also because it chose a film 4 x 5 old for a camera 1940 for all images. To process by hand and then I went to the computer. For me it was important to do so at that size because it allowed me to show the details of the animals, “he explains.Erika says she saw, through his work, animals that would not have achieved close in the wild. His obsession has profound, even religious reasons: “When we, as humans, we leave this world, our legacy remains with our families in spirit form. When these animals died, his legacy was physically preserved here so we can see it. “With its melancholy images, dyed a romantic aura, Erika refers to the relationship between human beings and nature because it attracts “the vulnerability of the human spirit and spiritual challenges that we all go, although some are aware of it and others do not “. The photographer has long intrigued by “internal battle complete submission to lose ourselves to reach a new life.”Although Erika Masterson is also inspired by the photographs showing women posing in sensual pose with stuffed animals or tiger skin rugs, so popular in the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century, it is inevitable that recall photographic fashion began to capture a strange relationship between men and beasts from the late nineteenth century and which it seemed to allude to the story of ‘beauty and the beast’. The latest pin-ups such as Dita Von Teese, still recreate the pose with the tigers, leopards and bears.The video in which Eartha Kitt sings ‘I want to be evil’ without letting one of those everlasting tiger skin rugs with stuffed head, and in which nothing happens but a very cute girl dreaming about being bad and hateful about a dead animal, is the best example of this trend went beyond photography.The woman and the dead beast had already created an image that, at least at the time, aroused the erotic fantasies of more than one. Without going into the history of Evelyn Nesbit and the turbulent events that summarize the life of what is considered the first supermodel posed with bears in Nesbit photographs they were printed on postcards.As Nesbit, Veronica Lake also posed repeatedly with dead animals, when the Tigers had already given way to the bears. Lilian Harvey, Kim Novak, Gloria Swanson , Josephine Baker (who also had a clouded leopard pet), Katherine Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe were among the models and actresses who succumbed to the charm of the dead beast. The list is endless. Other models and posed for photographers objective of Emilio Sommariva .Without seeking the parallelism and completely accidental, Erika Masterson has come to this type of image to send a message of love of nature, away from the questionable eroticism so popular during the first half of the twentieth century and part of the importance of relating to animals. Even dead. Because dissected, Erika says, “it is like the animals stay here” to remind us what they were. Beings whose beauty that neither death achieved wither.