“Ophelia, your secret is safe…”

It’s been a few years now since I shot this image. It was, at the time, one of my first ventures into photography as a means of personal catharsis. I’d known for a while that it also was perfectly suited for The Tori Project…as so does it become part of it now; a fitting whisper in an echo chamber.

“And I’m so sad, like a good book I can’t put this day back…“

I recently finally got around to ripping all of my Tori CDs onto my computer hard drive, so I could listen to them all on shuffle/repeat. Now, with just over 1 brand new gigabyte of music running pretty much constantly from my speakers, I was prompted to revisit my interest in continuing The Tori Project.

I had shot an entire set of these images years ago, specifically with Icicle in mind, and yet never got around to formally finishing one for the project. So, a few years late, I finally have the image ready here and have appropriately added it to the website gallery as well.

“I could have…I should have…I could have flown…”

Not the way I expected to start this again. And yet…there’s something illuminating about that.

By the time I’d decided to devote a category on this blog towards The Tori Project, I’d already shot a few of them. I’ve included one post relevant to the project thus far but never seemed to get around to making posts for the all the other previous ones.

Since I’ve been in the process of giving my website a facelift, I can sort of remedy this now. One of the galleries available on the main site is devoted strictly to The Tori Project…and I’ve just uploaded it for visual use.

In case you haven’t yet seen the site updates (and don’t realize a link to the site is right there to the right, in text!) here it is (circumventing the splash page to get directly to the site):

http://www.nihiluszero.com/home.html

This will be the first installment of my first actual photographic Project. As written on my profile showcasing the project:

I’ve been a big fan of Tori Amos for years. The riddling, emotive, piercing songs had been a quiet motivation for some of my imagery for a while…until it finally clicked that I would love doing a series based specifically on her songs. This is the result.

Concertina was actually shot before I knew I’d be devoting imagery directly to The Tori Project. Lela Rae and I had actually gotten quite hooked on the song during a NY trip we’d had with Sarah.

It was only afterward that I realized that the piercing story wound within Lela’s eyes in this shot spoke the very line of lyrics that I overlayed on the image: “I run into your thought from across the room.”

So, this became the first official, unofficial  image of The Tori Project.