“Cool, Creative and Contemporary” are prominent words in every Black + White Photography magazine edition. Seeking out black and white photographic works that fulfill this motto, the magazine recently discovered Brigham Young University photography professor Paul Adams. His feature in the November magazine, titled “Telling Stories”, focuses on Adams’ series of ironic fairytales, all within the monochromatic theme.
In one photograph of Paul Adams’ series, the unmistakable character Clark Kent stands in a line that weaves towards a river, in which a person with their hand raised to the square is performing an ordinance. Another photograph depicts the age-old story of Rapunzel, but a Rapunzel with a shorn head contemplating the land below her tower. Each photograph within Paul Adams’ series depicts a recognizable fairytale with an “ironic alternative”, as journalist Donatella Montrone explains within the magazine. The ironic alternatives within his photographs include thematic pastiches, character displacements, and uncommon perspectives.
Adams says that “these images respond to the need to bring order and significance to an anxious world. Re-envisioned in contemporary settings, my protagonists search for identity, attempt to shape their destinies, and encounter the unexpected. My heroes and heroines must work their way through perplexing conditions, disappointment, and compromise to uncover sublime moments of liberation, or redemption”
See more at blackandwhitephotographymag.co.uk