Wonderland (Photo Gallery)

The Wonderland Series is an evolving gallery of images by Israel based photographer Nadav Bagim captured on his kitchen table with models found around his home.

The WonderLand series, still under development, is being composed by using a unique but rather simple and elegant artificial lighting and household objects (from vegetables to plastic bags). The photos are shot (mostly) in a miniature studio on my kitchen’s table with a Canon EOS 60D Camera, and a Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro lens and Flashes, they are real and NOT a digital manipulation. The outcome is a beautiful and magical set with a fairy flair to it. The small models were found in my apartment and on plants outside my window, none of them was hurt during shooting. Stay tuned for new photos and in the meantime – Enjoy! (:

Wonderland Video

He even has a bunch of video from the photo shoots, since the Canon 60 d he used captures video as well. Check them out on his video page.

Links

• The full (and growing) gallery of Nadav Bagim’s Wonderland images
• Wonderland Video Page
• Flickr Gallery of Wonderland Images
• Source: Flavorwire

Definitions

The source link describes these images as psychedelic which means:

“of or noting a mental state characterized by a profound sense of intensified sensory perception, sometimes accompanied by severe perceptual distortion and hallucinations and by extreme feelings of either euphoria or despair.” Dictionary.com

Though Bagim claims to only use in-camera effects, meaning he did not make the backgrounds more colorful or crazy on his computer, they still look unreal. My experience is that many things in nature are unfamiliar and fantastic and seem like they cannot be real. The term Psychedelic often is meant to imply that the vision or hallucination was caused by a drug, like LSD. It’s important to note that drugs are not the only, or best source of psychedelic imagery. As long you’re in your right mind, and like to explore, you can find things that don’t look quite real almost everywhere you look.

Additionally, Wonderland, is a reference to the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol in which a young girl has a very unreal, psychedelic experience. The music that plays when you load the gallery on Bagim’s site is White Rabbit, from Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow Album, which references Alice in Wonderland and also describes, or references the distorting effect of drugs like LSD. To my ear, though i like the song, it makes the whole experience seem rather horrifying.

On his about page Nadav Bagim describes himself as an “autididact.” I had to look that up, and I’m glad I did.

Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is self-education or self-directed learning. In a sense, autodidacticism is “learning on your own” or “by yourself”, and an autodidact is a person who teaches him or herself something.

-Mike