JEREMY SAFFER
Daughters of Darkness
RARE BIRD BOOKS
10/10
Standing at 9.25” x 14.5” in dimension and weighing a hefty five pounds, the 288 full page, full color Daughters of Darkness standard edition book is a photographic collection by professional fine art nude photographer/band photographer Jeremy Saffer, featuring hundreds of models, celebrities, actresses, and musicians from all over the world—wearing only corpse paint.
What the viewer will notice immediately—besides a nude woman in corpse paint—is the stark emotion each photo provokes within them. The juxtaposition, the duality and the dichotomy of good versus evil can be delightfully frightening. The same can be said for the black metal genre as a whole. According to Saffer, there’s a certain beauty that lies within the black metal subgenre that’s not found in any other genre. It’s this basis and aesthetic that Saffer portrays through his lens with an acute sense of gritty and primal beauty, relying on a heavy contrast of light and shadow with each photo.
Created over a 12 year period specifically for this collection, a lot of the shoots took place on location in Los Angeles—with a few in Chicago, New York, and Connecticut—with the majority of the shoots taking place in Saffer’s own studio in Massachusetts. Although most of the models in the book are from the US, some models came in from all over the world, including Europe, Canada, and Asia. Each model that appears in the book applied their own corpse paint, which allowed their own vision of what black metal means to them to shine through. Plus, the foreword was penned by iconic vocalist Dani Filth of UK black metal band Cradle of Filth, while the introduction was written by vocalist D. Randall Blythe of Richmond, Virginia’s groove metal band Lamb of God.
In addition to the standard edition of the book (listed at $60; pre order subscriptions include mini prints, tote bag, guitar pics, stickers, and more), other bundles of the Daughters of Darkness book are also on offer, including the Bathory edition, which comes with an alternate bloody slipcase cover, vinyl soundtrack, extra 8×12 prints, guitar picks, stickers and more, while the Bloody Bathory edition includes extra stuff including a corpse paint makeup set, guitar picks, extra prints, tote bag, back patch, T-shirt, enamel pins, and more. The massive boxed set (only 25 available) comes with a custom-made, hand sewn, handmade wooden box cover with the Daughters of Darkness logo burned into it, 24 extra pages that don’t appear in any other edition, and comes with the vinyl soundtrack, black candles, corpse paint makeup set, mini prints, T-shirt, guitar picks, stickers, and more. The Daughters of Darkness book is a killer package for fans of black metal, art, photography, and the dark side of beauty. ~ Kelley Simms
BUY DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS HERE
