ebutterfield

I've always been surrounded by photography: My grandfather was a small-town professional photographer (he specialized in gauzy, hand-tinted portraits of Gladiolus Festival Queens and beaming local brides). He had a shingle hung in front of his house announcing "E.Butterfield Photography," so I come by the name honestly. My great-uncle was an photo analyst in WWII, and my father is a photographer for a suburban Chicago newspaper.

So it's no surprise how I've gotten to this point.

Recently, I have developed a deep and abiding obsession with Steampunk. I take a strange delight in more or less dressing up models in more or less Victorian clothing and equipping them with props and weapons and tools and backstories from an evolving alternate universe, where steam powers everything from trains to planes to computers; where aether and alchemy and plasmas and a sort of dark magical pseudo-science are commonplace. I even process the photos to look old and battered and time-worn, as if this world is being built backwards, reconstructed from its photographic relics.

I have a healthy interest in dark fantasy, and I'm frankly not afraid of the occasionally erotic. I'm also doing quite a bit of work lately in anime-inspired figure studies, poking around at the eroticism that sometimes uncomfortably underlies the characters, and stripping them down to their physical and fictional essentials to explore what interesting results that leaves us with. And sometimes I just want to do weird, dark, and/or perversely artsy photos.

In all of that, I like to manipulate what's real, tease out the fantastical from the mundane, and create images of people that tell a story or evoke a mood...or even just creep people out a little, even while they're looking at something--or someone--beautiful. In all my photography, I enjoy finding an element of darkness and creepiness and fantastical fun.

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