The Apparitions Of Florence Welch
The Apparitions of Florence Welch is a series of photographs I made from live performances during the Florence + The Machine Everybody Scream tour. The series gives form to the emotional and symbolic forces that emerge through performance.
I wasn’t interested in traditional portraiture, but in capturing shifting archetypal presences: the saint, the mourner, the ghost, the witch, the ecstatic, and others. These are archetypes and emotional states that have long recurred in my work. I was deeply moved by the sense of recognition I experienced during these performances, as though I were encountering, outside of myself, a symbolic and emotional language I had worked within for years.
For many years, I have been moved by the concept of duende. Federico García Lorca wrote about duende as an intense artistic force rooted in surrender and confrontation with the unseen. During these performances, I felt what I had long understood duende to mean: a profound emotional force that seemed to exceed both the performance and the performer, remaining with me long afterward.
These images emerged from what remained with me. They are emotional afterimages, shaped in the space where performance, memory, and personal projection fuse together. They are my attempt to give form to an experience that could not be articulated in any other way. What survives after the performance itself has passed? What remains when memory begins to alter, distort, and mythologize what was witnessed? These photographs exist in the liminal space between a real performance and the symbolic forms that emerged through it, then continued to transform through memory and imagination.
Each image in the series originates from photographs and videos I captured during the tour, which later became the source material for my process of optical layering, distortion, and rephotography. Rather than documenting the performances, they served as raw material for visual transformation. The resulting images were created through in-camera photographic and optical techniques, with minimal post-production.
Selected works from an ongoing series.
Additional works are first published on Instagram before being added to this archive.
