Berserk – July 2022

This was one of the earliest photo series I ever created, based on the manga Berserk — a foundational work in Japanese dark fantasy. The series has profoundly influenced the genre, serving as a key inspiration for many fantasy works, including video games by FromSoftware, such as Dark Souls and Elden Ring. For this set, I focused on the character Guts during the Golden Age arc — a period in the story marked by ambition, loyalty, and tragedy. My aim was to honour the legacy of the series while capturing its emotional intensity and historical atmosphere. To achieve this, I drew on the romanticised imagery of medieval chivalry, not as it was, but as it has been reimagined through art and poetry in later eras. This was a deliberate choice — much like how the Golden Age is viewed in Berserk, our own view of the past is often tinged with nostalgia and idealism, glossing over its true complexity. In preparation, I found myself inspired by artworks based on John Keats’ poem La Belle Dame sans Merci (“The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy”). Two paintings, in particular, helped guide the mood and style I was aiming for: • La Belle Dame sans Merci (1893) by John William Waterhouse, and • La Belle Dame sans Merci (c. 1901) by Frank Dicksee. Though the final results of the shoot may not have fully captured what I had envisioned, I look back on this series as a turning point. It was one of the first times I began exploring how photography could express raw emotion, melancholy, and storytelling — themes that have remained central to my work ever since.