Though we’ve seen a lot of creative self-portraits in our time, we haven’t come across ones that we’d wholeheartedly call magical…until now. New Hampshire-based Sarah Ann Loreth is a self-taught photographer who has a way of making us feel as though we’ve walked into a storybook. “I like to try to create my own reality,” she tells us. “I get so bored of mine. It’s fun to create galaxies and climb trees. But I guess overall, I’m trying to find myself by being someone else.”
Just where does Loreth get her inspiration? Curiously, from poetry. “I fill my head with Sexton, Plath, E.E. Cummings, Rumi, and Neruda and try to visualize what they are trying to express,” she said. “My ideas come to me at the oddest times, those 2am early morning ramblings that I write down in the dark that make no sense to me when I wake up. When I make sense of things, I feel those are my best ideas pulled out of the place between sleeping and awake. When I hit a creative dryspell I read poetry or take long drives.”
When asked what she hopes others get out of her photos, here’s what Loreth told us. “I want people to feel how I feel when I take the photos. I want people to feel cold when I am barefoot in the snow. I want people to believe they can fly or breath moths or believe in fairies and build forts in the woods. I suppose above all else, I want to help others dream and know that photography can take them where reality never could.” Thanks for the tip, Erica!