- Desiree A. Neville
Follow your heart!
A lot of successful businesses start from a heart project. Mine certainly did. I always had a camera in my hands from the time I was 8 years old when my grandpa gave me his old camera to play with. So the photography part was almost part of my DNA. What I wanted to photograph though, came from a childhood fascination.
It all started when I saw the movie "The Sound of Music". The part when they do the marionette show stuck with me. I am not sure what about it made me dream but I became obsessed with wanting to have a marionette theatre. Later on, in my childhood, there was this tv show on French Radio Canada called 'Fanfreluche'. Each week, this life-size rag doll, called Fanfreluche, would read us a story from her storybook. That was not an ordinary storybook... It was also life-size and the characters in it could hear and speak to Fanfreluche. Invariably, she would disagree with parts of the story and would go into the book to try to correct the wrong that she saw - most fairy tales were criticized by my hero, the rag doll, and today, these fairy tales often prove controversial The concept of being inside a story was reminiscent of a couple of episode of "Betwiched" when little Tabitha ended up inside a fairy tale book and interacted with the characters. This is the aspect that fascinated me
If I could be in my own story, I could make it anything I wanted.
All this must have melded together in my mind and made me imagine scenes with real children in them.
This is what I still want to convey today. I love imagining a story and figure out how to construct it and execute it. That is why my photos keep evolving and look different over the years. I have wanted to build a business around the concept of themes. I figured every parent sees their children in some sort of character. And I know every child sees themselves as something we may not perceive.
My goal is to bring that story element to every photoshoot. When it's one of my personal projects, I imagine a story and when it's for a client, I want to understand their story and photograph that.
When I stop and look at my work, the most successful images are the ones that were done from my heart. from a place of innocence and truth. When I feel something genuinely, the results show it.
My motivation now is to Do It From the Heart.
