SangTong

The title of this series of photographic art, Sang Tong, translates as ‘the golden shell’ and comes from a beautiful old Thai folk tale about a boy who emerges triumphant and ‘golden’ from disquieting circumstances beyond his control. The series features portraits of young children who are all adoptees from Thailand and now living in Melbourne. They appear to hover in a fantasy realm that Everton has specifically created to express their individual personalities; a hyper-real version of each child’s sense of self. The images hint at something extraordinary as the innermost thoughts and fears, fragility and strengths of these children are brought to life in dazzling scenes that Everton calls “magic realism”. Furthermore, the series was created without resorting to digital tricks – everything that you see was captured directly in camera. “Suspension is the dominant word that comes to mind when I think of my working method for this series,” comments Everton. “The set and lighting was to the degree of making a small film in its complexity. If you were standing in the studio at the time of the shoot you would have seen a large, completely blacked out room. The magical world was in the centre where each child lay on a high, glass structure I had constructed. Above them floating objects were suspended, and below painted canvases and props, such as eagles and tigers, referenced aspects of their unique interior visions. If you looked up you would have seen me suspended with camera, quite literally harnessed to the top of a cherry picker 6 metres above the set and endeavoring to capture that singular, spontaneous moment.”

Samantha Everton is a Austraslian-based photographer with a taste for magic realism and seeing the absurd in everyday interactions. Samantha has won a number of awards including the prestigious Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize , highly Commended, the 23rd MacGregor Prize for Photography and the 2006 Australian Leica Photographer of the Year. Her work has been published and reviewed in numerous books and magazines around the world, including The NewYorker.