The Apparitions Of Florence Welch

The Apparitions of Florence Welch is a photographic series created from photographs I took during her performances, exploring the emotional and symbolic forces that emerged through them.

I wasn’t interested in traditional portraiture, but in capturing shifting archetypal presences: the saint, the mourner, the ghost, and the ecstatic. These are archetypes and emotional states that have long appeared 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 described duende as an intense emotional force rooted in surrender and confrontation with the unseen. During these performances, I felt something close to what I had long understood duende to mean: an emotional force that exceeded the performance and remained with me 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 I found difficult to articulate 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.

These images also come from my lifelong intuitive way of perceiving. Since childhood, I have experienced what some call auras: color and energy that extends beyond the visible body. The photographs are not intended as literal documentation of these phenomena, but as my attempts to give visual form to the way that I perceive.

I approach each photograph intuitively, working in-camera with light, movement, and optical experimentation. Rather than seeking to preserve the performance as it occurred, I allow the image to move away from documentation and toward the emotional afterimage that remains.

Selected works from an ongoing series.
New works are shared on Instagram as the series develops.

Works from this series are not available for sale.