In 1998 I started making the 11thMuse photo series of model Liesbeth Odilia. She, the model, started telling about herself from the day she was born while moving in front of the camera. It appeared as if she was making a journey through her life. Now there was a woman in front of the camera, she was no longer a model. Even the very tone of the story changed; she bent forward and it seemed as if she was looking into another world and wanted to tell what she saw there.

She stood upright; life seemed to have changed shape. She moved out of focus, very powerfully, as if she was becoming someone else. The images cast on the wall became clearer and clearer as if they wanted to reveal an autonomous story of the life of her soul.

The high, plastered walls of the studio, with the woman in front of it, in her sorrow, tenderness and strength…………  . She appeared to change into a Greek female warrior, while the bit of cloth that she was holding in her hands almost became a weapon, proud before the battle, pointing at her shadow on the wall… but these silhouettes on the wall betrayed a completely different picture, that of a winged shape.

Step by step I captured her movements on film. She was speaking softly in Greek now, saying almost inaudibly:

‘Εάν εγκαταλείψω τη ζωή αυτή, μαζί με τη σκιά μου, το μόνο που θα έχω να κάνω είναι να ξαναρχίσω και πάλι από την αρχή’.

“If I get out of this life, together with my shadow, the only thing I must then is start all over again”.

With these words from the text of a Greek song written by her she placed herself in the past of her future.

These words came back to me on the day, with high dense, white clouds in the sky, when the time had come for her to go to the Time of Silence, or Η ώρα της σιωπής… in the spring of 2004.

Peter Peereboom Delft Holland