John William Waterhouse, Odysseus and the Sirens (1891)

The Sirens were actually portrayed as three bird-women parented by the river god Achelous and Chthon, otherwise known as Mother Earth. These dangerous beauties resided in a flowery meadow on an island, perpetually calling after their father who had gone to the sea and left them all behind. Another story had them banished to the island (possibly the Isle of Capri) after losing a singing contest with the Muses, and so they took out their frustrations by luring sailors to swim ashore, pouncing on them and ripping their flesh with their talons, then adding their bones to the piles already littering the island. Yet another tells of their ultimate demise, throwing themselves into the ocean after Odysseus passed without succumbing to their song.

August Rodin, Crouching Woman (1881)

I had also recently seen Auguste Rodin’s Crouching Woman (1881), a beautiful sculpture at the Musée Rodin in Paris. The dark shine of its surface makes me feel like I’m at the bottom of the ocean. It is still considered one of his greatest achievements, and in fact, Octave Mirbeau, an avid Rodin collector and supporter, referred to this sculpture as “my frog,” which I found to be quite serendipitous for my purposes! This figure was also included in his larger work The Gates of Hell, a bronze portal meant for the Musée des Arts Decoratifs which he never finished. In it, she represents one of the lost souls being judged in the Last Judgment—also quite an interesting connection to my newly created endangered species.

Marie Vaccarello, Siren on set

I cast one of my favorite models, Marie Vaccarello, as my Siren. Marie has this built-in sweetness to her that is very disarming, which made her perfect for my Siren’s song. So innocent looking, right?

Though they were clearly not considered sea deities, their story and their origin certainly starts and ends in the ocean. But just like they were torn between earth and ocean, both by nature and by cultural evolutions, I decided to reconnect the siren to the sea by combining its suborder Alcae (coastal birds which nest on sea cliffs and “fly” underwater to catch fish) with another sea monster, Cecaelia—a largely Japanese octopus person (dating back as far as Hokusai) most frequently shown as a woman with octopus or squid tentacles for legs. As my raptor-like Siren somehow lost its ability to feed on men, it evolved into a diving bird, and our captured specimen had just been thrown this octopus at feeding time. We had a lot of fun on the shoot, including a series of alternate takes wearing these really weird aviator-style goggles.

And just in case you were wondering—yes, she is holding a real octopus. What a great sport!

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Visit LEVIATHANS to view the photo series and to read behind-the-scenes features!

Visit LEVIATHANS to view the photo series and to read behind-the-scenes features!

The opening FRAGMENT shot in the WONDERLAND series, “Hotel Wonderland”, is a bit of both. I had completed the “Alice Falls” shot, and so I was digging for inspiration to help me continue developing the idea. On a trip to NYC, I decided to go sightseeing on one of those double-decker buses, just to take some pictures and see if anything caught my attention.

Lo and behold, we drove past the Hotel Wellington, and I caught a great picture of the sign out front. That giant sweeping ‘W’ just screamed ‘Wonderland.’ After performing a little digital magic, the Hotel Wellington became the Hotel Wonderland, the inspiration for the story behind the WONDERLAND photo series.

Strangely enough, the cool atmosphere of “Alice’s Mushroom” came about on a warm summer morning in Orlando, Florida. I was visiting a friend shortly after completing the rest of the shoot, and we had been up celebrating far too late the night before. As morning broke, I wandered out onto his front lawn to catch the first sunlight. There in my friend’s driveway among these great wood chips and greenery sat this great mushroom, just beckoning me to shoot it. I ran back inside to grab my camera, and another FRAGMENT was born. The contrast between the crispness of that mushroom and the out-of-focus ground cover still knocks me out, because that’s exactly how it looked to me under those sleep-deprived conditions.

The “ALICE” was added in post-production. I was tempted to try writing it in the moment, but I just couldn’t bring myself to possibly damage that pristine mushroom. Besides, I could almost hear the hookah-smoking caterpillar just behind it, calling out to me contemptuously, “Who are YOU?”… but maybe that too was just the delirium from staying up all night.

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Photographer/Creative Director: HUSVAR

Visit WONDERLAND to view the photo series and to read behind-the-scenes features!

Once I had the basic idea for the story (see My Version of the Story for that—um, story), I knew that there was only one event from the book that could encapsulate the events that sent my Alice over the edge, and that was the Mad Tea-Party.

I had originally envisioned the scene a lot more like “Taxi Driver.” Alice spends a lot of her time alone, just like Travis Buttle (but without the mohawk and the incessant pull-ups). One day while playing crazy hostess to her “friend” the March Hare, she asks it a simple question—how do I get back to Wonderland? When she doesn’t get an answer from this inanimate object, polite asking turns into violent interrogating.

After the March Hare does not respond any differently to her threats than to her sweet inquiries, she loses it and strangles the stuffie. We had so much fun with this angle, and Brooke really committed to the role. After playing this out and taking a short break, we tackled the “Melancholy Alice” shot. Seeing how well that turned out (see Remaking Alice for that story), I wanted to try another angle as well, something less Scorcese and more David Lynch. And that’s how we ended up at my Alice’s Mad Cocktail Party. I mean, the only thing my Alice could do that was crazier than interrogating a stuffie was—well, nothing. Just sit and have a drink with it.

In the book, Alice has a cat named Dinah that she misses dearly. We tried to find a good stuffed cat for a prop, but nothing worked, and they all actually ended up competing with the March Hare in the shot. When I mentioned this to Brooke (Alice) on the set, she responded with seven magical words: “I have a black cat named Hollywood.” What’s more Wonderland than that? At first when she brought him to the set, Hollywood the cat was quite apprehensive. After a little calming, he found a comfortable spot that he liked. He then spent the entire photo shoot perched atop the fridge! It was priceless. Anyone who says that animals are difficult to work with never worked with Hollywood.

Besides, not only did he fulfill the role of Dinah, he played the Cheshire Cat, too! Check out those creepy hypnotic eyes!

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Photographer/Creative Director: HUSVAR
Model: Brooke Rewa
Wardrobe Stylist: Andrew Slyder
Photo Assistant: Luke Copping
Production Assistant: Nadejda Petrova
Lighting Consultant: Chris Santucci
Makeup Stylist: Anna Malskaya
Hair Stylist: Josselyn Scott
Wardrobe Assistant: Monika Byrne
Assistants: Laura Sargent & Emilee Hoelscher

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As you can see from the above shot of the completed set (read Building Hotel Wonderland for that story), I had thought ahead enough to book three different “models” to fill the role of the March Hare, each very different from the next, to see which one would end up working the best. The realistic small brown bunny sitting on the high chair just was too small and harmless to attend the cocktail hour I had planned. And the medium-sized pink one just screamed Easter and drew too much attention away from the hostess. So the big (but otherwise nondescript) wallflower was invited.

It looked crazy and perfectly out of place on top of that little high chair, but it still wasn’t right. Since it was brand new, it looked like Alice had just brought it home from the store. Much like the character in the book, I wanted this March Hare to have belonged to Wonderland long before Alice set foot there. So with its permission, our stylists began the magical transformation that every model goes through for a shoot. Well, maybe not every model has their eyes removed and abdomen sliced open.

It was a little creepy at first, gutting an innocent bunny like this. We feared that some higher power was looking down at us in judgment for stuffie abuse! But it never complained, not even once, so we just kept going. With each handful of dirt, with every carefully misplaced smear of permanent marker, it belonged more and more in Alice’s kitchen. In the end, we will openly admit it, without any guilt or shame—it was fun to completely destroy this rabbit.

We tried to imagine what this thing had gone through in all those years at the Hotel Wonderland . . . at least a year shoved under the sink, forgotten next to the rusted leaky pipes . . . perhaps a decade collecting dust on top of the refrigerator . . . and when it wasn’t out of sight, it was being dragged around these floors by some sad child, the same child that probably taped over its eyes when they rescued it from the dumpster in the alley.

When we were done, the March Hare sat in the high chair and held its cup for tea. Well, it held the cup as best as it could with one of its hands missing. If you think what we did was inhumane—if only in the sense that this particular “model” is going to have a hard time booking a gig with X’s for eyes—well, I like to believe that this was the role it was born to play, transformed from a simple stuffed bunny into a March Hare as complex and ominous as the blind prophet Tiriesas from Homer’s Odyssey.

Besides, don’t you think these look much better on me? Who’s the Mad Hatter now!

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Salvador Dalí
Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas (Rhinoceros Dressed In Lace) (1956)
Bronze cast

Sometimes, fiction really is stranger than truth.

The story goes something like this… It was the year 1515, and Pope Leo X had been sent a very unusual gift by Manuel I, then King of Portugal—a pet rhinoceros. Unfortunately, the ship carrying his present sank before it reached him in Florence, and so the rhino went down with it. But before it sank to the bottom of the ocean, the rhino had the honor of being the first ever seen on European soil, where it was sketched during a brief pit stop in Lisbon.

As it was a largely unknown creature, Europeans at the time had little information beyond their imaginations as to what a rhinoceros actually looked like. What they did know was what the ancient Roman Pliny had written about it—that it was a fierce creature and a mortal enemy of the elephant.

The 1515 Albrecht Dürer Rhinoceros

Albrecht Dürer was charged with turning that sketch into a woodcut. Keep in mind that he never actually saw the rhino—just the sketch of the rhino. As you can see from his finished work, it seems that the power of the rhino’s imaginary myth was as strong in Dürer’s mind as it was in the rest of Europe. Saggy folds of skin became armor, and an extra horn was placed on the ridge of its back. He even incorporated Pliny’s description into this “academic” drawing.

For the next 250 years, this fictional rhinoceros found its way into the collective conscience, everywhere from textbooks to royal crests. It continued to hold sway and influence the perception of the creature through several more eyewitness accounts, and even the advent of photography.

Salvador Dalí, La aventura prodigiosa de la encajera y el rinoceronte (1954)

Following the filming of his 1954 surrealist movie La aventura prodigiosa de la encajera y el rinoceronte (The Prodigious Adventure of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros), Salvador Dalí took inspiration from the original woodcut print to create Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas, a three-ton statue now sitting in Puerto Banús in Marbella, Spain. In addition to incorporating the trademark armor and extra horn of the Dürer design, he added two sea urchins—his humorous way of sending Dürer’s misrepresentation to join the “original” in its watery grave.

Salvador Dalí, Rinoceronte vestido con puntillas (1956)

The fact that this smaller version of the original sculpture is number 140 of a limited edition of 499 is only one reason it holds a very special place in my collection. The story of how I procured this piece is almost as strange as the story behind the piece itself. I had recently selected Dürer’s rhinoceros woodcut to use as a logo for a business venture. Then, while on vacation in Europe, I found this sculpture in a gallery window in France. At the time, I had no idea that Dalí’s Rinoceronte even existed, much less that it had been based on my new business logo! I purchased this rhinoceros immediately and have been enamored with it and its story ever since.

Photographer/Creative Director: HUSVAR
Model: Brooke Rewa
Set Designer: Bryan Lohr
Wardrobe Stylist: Andrew Slyder
Photo Assistant: Luke Copping
Production Assistant: Nadejda Petrova
Lighting Consultant: Chris Santucci
Makeup Stylist: Anna Malskaya
Hair Stylist: Josselyn Scott
Wardrobe Assistant: Monika Byrne
Assistants: Laura Sargent & Emilee Hoelscher

Visit WONDERLAND to view the photo series and to read behind-the-scenes features!