Brooke Shaden

Each square frame created by photographer Brooke Shaden is like a window into another world. Her painterly approach imbues her photographs with mystery and atmosphere, and her studio work appears touched by nature, albeit in a surreal and otherworldly sense. She enhances these effects by expertly manipulating and editing her raw photographs in post-production, adding layers of patina to each image, giving them a timeless, fairytale quality. She began working with self-portraits in order to have complete control over her images, but her photographs are more about the fantasy of making the impossible possible than about autobiography. With each image, Shaden sets out to “make beautiful that which others find disturbing…and mold it into something complex and magnetic.”