Though more than 40 years have passed since her death in 1961, experimental filmmaker Maya Deren remains a haunting, mesmeric figure. Beautiful, brilliant and doomed, Deren was a fixture of the Greenwich Village art scene throughout the 1940s and 50s, counting painter Marcel Duchamp, composer John Cage and writers Anais Nin and Henry Miller among her closest friends. Fans over the years have included architect Le Corbusier, critic James Agee, filmmaker David Lynch, and, more recently, fashion photographer Patric Shaw, who created a spread for the Italian magazine Flair inspired by scenes from two of Deren's films, At Land and Meshes of the Afternoon.
Shaw's images chronicled the adventures of model Amanda Moore, chosen in part for her resemblance to the filmmaker (in addition to directing, Deren was also usually the star of her film), leaping magically from a dark forest into a cabaret filled with stylish urbanites and then, apparently having her fill of glamorous nightlife, jumping back into the woods.
The scenes in nature are in vivid color and the scenes in the cabaret are either in black-and-white or muted, monochromatic tones, with some of the images showing Moore in transit, halfway between the color and black-and-white worlds. For help in pulling off this bit of surrealist sleight-of-hand, Shaw called in the retouchers of New York City' Shootdigital Studios.
Shaw had originally put together a hand-drawn storyboard of the series to show Flair's art director, Alex Gonzalez; the main cabaret image showed Moore/Deren sitting on a tabletop surrounded by other figures. This was shot with the model in a frosted wig and bustier, surrounded by a crowd of revelers, with Moore turning her face away from the group, eyes cast down. After reviewing the shot, however, Gonzalez suggested taking out all of the figures except for Moore and one seated man who sits gazing up at her, making the picture much less surreal and more sexual in nature.