The serpents are on their way to oblivion. Petals leap against the dark arcs of hawkmoths. And all the while, the mind’s architect opens her hands, as the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously wrote, “to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth” to these “shadows of imagination”—to extend what we would extend to no other fantasy: our own “willing suspension of disbelief.”
This is what it’s like to encounter Amanda Tinker‘s series, “Small Animal,” where nature’s own dreams are procured and suspended before us in ethereal menageries.
I imagine Tinker, like Alice, perpetually at the brink of Wonderland. But no cake or tea will get you there. You need the prism of a camera lucida. “This instrument,” Tinker reminds us, “is part of the origin story of photography, giving way to a desire to fix ephemeral images permanently.” In this issue of Od Review, Tinker explains the mechanics of these fragile, lucid fantasies.