Our favorite of the week. The latest series by Reine Paradis, entitled “Eclipse”. The images were accompanied by this text.
Born in 1989 and a graduate of the Gobelins School of Visual Communication in Paris, Reine Paradis has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2012 – a city of cinema, stories, fantasies, and eternal self-reinvention. It provides the perfect environment for the creation of her works which include photography, painting, film, and sculpture.
Her latest photo series “Eclipse” includes 15 photos shot all around the world.
The Eclipse process involves several steps, the first of which is the imagination of a scenario. From that vision, she creates a small, maquette glued on paper. This maquette is used as a blueprint when she scouts for the perfect location to photograph a scene the scouting process alone can take years.
Once a location is found, Paradis designs and creates costumes, props, and her origami-influenced sculptures, which will all be part of the scene.
With the help of a partner who shoots the images, Paradis stages herself as the main figure in the work, adding a performative dimension that is essential to her process “living” the scene allows her to fully transmit her original vision. Unflinching in the face of extreme situations and shielded by a blond wig, she embodies another character as an extension of herself, through which she can experience an alternative life, if only momentarily.
Editing the photos is a meticulous process completed by Paradis herself, in a game of perspective and depth she projects her world onto ours, changing each individual tone of the image to fit within her minimalist color palette.
One usually thinks of photography as a tool to capture reality. We should start from the opposite assumption in the scenes of Reine Paradis. The resulting self-portraits bear witness of her imagination while transporting the viewer into a perfect frame of her world.
Eclipse won first place in the 2025 International Photography Awards.
A new feature film, PARADISLAND, following the making of the series Eclipse, is set for release in the spring/summer 2026 for a worldwide theatrical and streaming audience.
