Creative Direction & Photography: Mena Assad
Art Direction & Styling: Ismail Thabet
Model: Ines Sawiris
Shot on Portra 400 & Portra 800
Developed & Scanned at
The Darkroom Cairo
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in the Wonderland contained rebuttals for
prevalent medical theories back then. Especially Sir James
Crichton-Browne’s 1860 paper “Psychological Diseases in Early Life”
which denounced the practice of “castle building” or daydreaming in
Children. Carroll’s Alice in the Wonderland and its sequel Through the
Looking Glass alternatively advocated daydreaming, boredom, and
imaginative flights as essential building blocks for creativity.
Inspired by Carroll’s approach to these concepts, “In A Wonderland She
Lies” is a photographic series whose protagonist is modern day Alice,
championing the forgotten virtues of boredom, dreaming away the days,
departing on imaginative flights away from some mundane reality, in a
Wonderland of her own creation she lies
“In a Wonderland [she lies],
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream-
Lingering in the golden gleam-
Life, what is it but a dream?”
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS.