Changing Faces of Witches in Contemporary Photography

Abstract

In photography, the image of witchcraft has always been associated with the quality of being different, due to the necessity of representing the
inexplicable or the strange. Very rarely in the history of images the owners of paranormal powers have been presented as being immerged in banality.
However, nowadays, photographers treat as well this aspect, but the image of witches is, by excellence, associated with an extravagant physical aspect. The
means to do this are very different: the body, the outfit, the expression, the scenography of the environment where the witch is being represented shall
take the attributes of an extravagance which underlines her/his qualities as out of the common, which also imply the idea of isolation and the glamour of
a varied display of explicit powers. The new witches that some photographers depict nowadays seem born out of a desire for an anticapitalistic life, out of
the system, as in the Wicca movement, for instance. In this paper, a focus is put on the aesthetic ways of presenting the image of the witch in photography,
depending on the specific period of time artists refer to in their works.