Stepping Right Into a Photographic Fairy Tale

Gisele the Beautiful. Gerda the Snow Queen. Gudrun the Sacred. Ottoline the Wealthy. Spending time with Nashalina Schrape’s photographs feels like opening a well-loved book of fairy tales and discovering characters you feel like you know but have never actually met. Familiar and not quite.

Here, in timeless black and white, play out tales of light and darkness. A happy ending is possible but not a given. Innocence is precious and fragile. Indecision and fear reside next to beauty. “There’s no lesson in you just being safe,” Nashalina Schrape says of her project, True Fiction. “The lesson is walking into the darkness and the uncertainty and finding your courage.”

Schrape was born in West Berlin before the fall of

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