Image with cemetery background.

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This image is about enlightenment. In the story, Pinocchio symbolizes the journey of the human spirit through life, from child to adult or from puppet to real boy. What if the Blue Fairy dictated at which point in that journey you woke or slept? Here, she is attaching strings to youth, giving Pinocchio responsibility and binding him to temporal grounds, weighting his mortality. Youth is so fleeting and life is so short, you don't appreciate it until you are an adult, at which point, you can never go back. My Blue creates a fairy freeze to stop you, and make you look around before you miss it. Forever and ever and ever.

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I photographed this in the Zentralfriedhof (the Vienna Central Cemetery), spanning 2.5 km2 (620 acres) with 330,000 interments and up to 25 burials daily. It has a dead population of almost twice the present living residents of Vienna and first opened for business in 1874 on Halloween, that blurred boundary between worlds. Most Catholics rejected cremation, instead preferring a "Schöne Leich" - a beautiful corpse. To avoid the horror of premature burial, a corpse could have a string attached to its finger, to wiggle, ringing a bell above ground. Anybody? Anybody?

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Special Edition 1 of 1 + 1AP: Diasec print on Dibond with aluminium grip, 245 cm x 180 cm