Lucid Dreaming in Photography

On the floral couch sits a barefooted girl wearing a black fur hat, a black blouse, and a green taffeta skirt. The model’s wide-eyed, yet steely expression makes the photo seem more like a high- fashion ad campaign than it does a high school art project.  When Clara Emery gets behind a camera, she manages to capture moments that look strikingly familiar and otherworldly all at once.

By her own admission, Emery very much believes that her photos should be looked at purely for their beauty.

“There’s actually not a whole lot of meaning behind my work,” Emery said. “ I just think that people can be really pretty, and that things can look really interesting,”

Emery first started taking pictures in eighth grade, doing landscapes and still lifes. She started to take an interest in portraiture in 10th grade when she took her first Advanced Photography class.

Some of Emery’s inspirations include Annie Leibovitz and Erwin Olaf. Emery aims to take photos that are dramatic and expressive. Like Leibovitz, Emery aspires to work for Vogue when she’s older.

“I want to work for different companies on advertisements and fashion photography; stuff like that,” Emery said. “Eventually I want to work up to going to Vogue. It’s just going to take awhile.”

Emery’s inspiration for photos comes primarily from her dreams or visions. Her work has been described as looking dreamlike, where the models appear almost alien. She choses to create original content in a fine art style, as opposed to replicating someone else’s idea.

“Sometimes it takes weeks to plan my photoshoots. For a lot of them I’ll have a dream and then try to recreate it,” Emery said. “A lot of the time I’ll start out with an initial photo idea but when i get to the shoot I’ll end up doing something different.”

For Emery, successful photoshoots are a mixture between precise detail and inspired spontaneity.

Because her work includes complex poses and detailed costumes, the models Emery uses are vital to the outcome of the photos. One of her models, sophomore Genevieve Wisdom, describes Emery’s photos.

“Clara’s photography has a feeling of fantasy, mixed with a dark edge,” Wisdom said. “Her ideas are daring and seem a little crazy but she always pulls it off beautifully.”

Another important factor to her photos is location. Emery prefers to shoot in historic, antiquated places.

“The place that I keep revisiting is my friend, Samantha Stein’s, Grandmother’s house,” Emery said. “It’s completely full of antiques. On the outside it’s really modern, but when you go inside it’s all really old. Everything in there is early 1900s or late 1800s.”

When asked why she prefers to express herself through photography, Emery replied, “I enjoy creating beautiful scenes. “I still don’t know if there is a deeper meaning in my work, but I don’t think there needs to be, as long as it’s breathtaking.”