Dàli
In January 2018, I started Georgian Fairy Tales, a personal project in tribute to Georgia’s rich mythical heritage. The first episode is about Dàli, the goddess of animals and patron of hunting.
“In the olden days, Georgians spoke of a mythical patron of hunters and animals, a pagan goddess of the forests and mountains. Her name was Dàli, and she was often shown as a young woman of blinding beauty…”
The shoot took almost a year to prepare and a month to produce, from designing the mask to scanning the negatives.
“A strong, independent spirit, Dàli kept the bond between hunters and their prey balanced and respectful. She held the human appetite in check, letting hunters take only what they needed to eat and to feed their villages. An especially worthy hunter might be rewarded with Dàli’s love, and sometimes with a magical artefact that sharpened his hunting skills. Such encounters usually came with a binding promise to keep them secret. A hunter who broke the oath died.”
“But when Christianity spread to Georgia, the role of patron of hunting passed to Saint George, the country’s heavenly protector. Unable to compete with so strong a rival, Dàli came to be shown as an animal-like creature, a beast that posed great danger to man. Everything good in her was denied…”
The project began with a moodboard: the sources of inspiration, the details of the mask, and the atmosphere and colour tones of the pictures.
“This metamorphosis from spirit to animal, from goddess to monster, played out against the struggle between paganism and Christianity in Georgia: an epic conflict between the old gods and the new saints, between primeval feminine magic and a male-dominated religion, between nature and the unchecked expansion of human ambition.”
The photographs are available as limited-edition prints: 30×40 analogue silver prints in black and white, and 50×60 C-prints in colour. You can also buy digital prints from the Fotografia gallery →
Model: Irina Petrova · Mask engineer and technical director: Timur Ivanov · General producer and behind-the-scenes photographer: Giga Siprashvili · Assistant: George Kolbaia · Special thanks to SBF/Sinar Swiss for technical support · Film developed and scanned by DPartphoto