Leda

I stood in the Galleria Borghese in front of Sodoma's Leda and the Swan and felt her delusion as if it was my own. The way she leans into him — into the swan, into Zeus — her expression somewhere between surrender and trance, like someone who has been convinced that what is happening to her is a beautiful and natural thing. I recognized that state. The veil of false love draped so carefully it feels like warmth until it doesn't.
I didn't want to photograph what the painter painted. I wanted to capture what I saw, what I heard — what she felt.

So I decided on utilizing a classic invocation of motion blur, aiming my Nikon F100 directly at Leda, with precise exposure calculated, I simultaneously both released the shutter and shifted to the side. The intentional blur pulls Sodoma's Renaissance painting out of its fixed certainty and into something closer to what I believe was her actual experience — dreamlike, disorienting, the edges of reality dissolving the way they do when you are inside something that feels like love but is only pursuit, when you cannot yet see the difference between being chosen and being taken. Leda is not a photograph of a painting. It is a photograph of a state of mind.

What follows that state is what the painting never shows — the abandonment, the aftermath, the slow return to a self that has been changed without consent. The ornate vintage gold frame places her back inside the tradition that romanticized her story for centuries, asking what it has always meant to look at a woman in that moment and call it beauty.

This piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.