LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

Motherhood: Mari Saxon: An Untold Fairytale by Aline SmithsonMay 4, 2026

©Mari Saxon, Once Upon a time there lived…., from An Untold Fairytale

Why do we seem to create fantastical worlds in childhood? Childhood allows for our imaginations to thrive and as life gets more complicated we lose a lot of magic. As adults, we often become reconnected to those fantastical worlds after having children. An Untold Fairytale reclaims that imaginative space as an ongoing site of identity-making. In this performative photography series, Mari Saxon constructs otherworldly, fairy tale–inspired scenes with her two daughters, using staged self-portraiture to explore motherhood, femininity, and the fluid boundaries between reality and invention. These images are not nostalgic, instead use fantasy as a framework through which lived experience can be reimagined.

Emerging from the dislocation of emigration, the project transforms the domestic space into a site of collaborative storytelling and visual experimentation. Drawing on the darker themes of Russian folk traditions, Saxon’s constructed environments hold both a strange beauty and with a sense of unease. Through this layered approach, An Untold Fairytale navigates themes of displacement, adaptation, and shared memory, offering a space in which identity remains continually in flux.

Saxon’s project was featured in the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2025 and she has recently finished a successful Kickstarter to launch a book of this work. Stay tuned!

An Untold Fairytale

An Untold Fairytale is a performative photography series exploring motherhood, self-identification and femininity through playful self-portraits.

The sudden emigration wrenched me from the calm and comfortable life of a middle-aged architect into the one of an exile in a new land, where I turned to photography as a way of holding my family together, of inventing possibilities for new ways of existence.

I began constructing a private, fairy-tale world, which only my two daughters have access to. The world where the boundaries of possibility dissolve, identity, reality, and imagination become blurred, the feminine fantasyland sprung from the bedtime tales mothers weave for their children. We are playing with folk tales archetypes, haunted, mystical, grotesque, yet the characters and scenes do not replicate any existing stories, our fairytale is still untold.

My daughters and I grew up on old Russian fairytales, which are filled with mystery, often frightening, and saturated with the darker undercurrents of human nature. This dark mystery seems to linger in the edges of the project’s photographs, offering a spectral frame to the visual narrative. The deliberately unhidden elements of a makeshift, low-budget photo studio introduce a Barthesian “third meaning” into the series.

A photobook based on this project is currently in production. The book unfolds as a constructed fairy tale in a small attic world filled with warm light, which exists alongside an encroaching dark forest, a metaphor for the hostile and unfamiliar outside world. These spaces form several coexisting layers of reality: everyday life in a rented house, the threatening landscape beyond it, and an inner, fairy-tale handmade realm where transformation is constant and identities remain fluid.

Through portraits, still lifes, and recurring symbolic motifs, the book reflects on motherhood, female identity, emigration, and the shifting boundary between reality and dream. The project functions both as a personal coping mechanism and as a visual narrative about displacement, adaptation, and shared memory.

The self-published book will be available for purchase on my website in Fall 2026.

©Mari Saxon, Hold her tightly, from An Untold Fairytale

Mari Saxon is a Russian-born conceptual photographer based in the USA since 2022. Rooted in academic art education and long-term architectural practice, she constructs her visual language through staged compositions. Her images are conceived scenographically, employing ironic allusions to classical painting, play, absurdity, and complex symbolism as key visual strategies.

Saxon engages with themes of motherhood, female subjectivity, displacement, and self-identification through performative self-portraits, staged narratives, and constructed characters.

Since the beginning of her practice as a lens-based artist in 2023, her work has been presented in more than 50 exhibitions, recognized with numerous awards, and is held in private collections.

Instagram @marisaxon.art