Written by Megan May Walsh
Edited by Jana Massoud
Photo Edited by Lucia Luzzani

A faerie bonding herself to gain her mother’s attention; a siren ruining the lives of men with her paralyzing voice and sensual movements; a troll riddled with pain, forced to endure the prodding of cruel and invasive doctors; a fallen angel seeking another life on earth to be left branded, disfigured, and all alone; and a water sprite glad to be missing from the world, immersed in the black slime of darkness that once consumed her. Artist Petra Collins’ and Euphoria actress Alexa Demie’s Fairy Tales is an otherworldly and mythic collection of photographs and short stories portraying a reimagining of fairy tales with a dark and erotic twist. Blending despairing emotional realities of loneliness and objectification with fantastical imaginations of mermaids and banshees, Collins and Demie navigate the dark and winding corridors of mental health, love, lust, desire, and wild, untamed escapism.

Collaborating on this project, Collins and Demie desired to create something that drew upon their childhood need to escape reality, casting into existence other worlds that embodied both their fantasies and traumas. In a world where the male-gaze simultaneously commodifies and criminalizes femininity, Collins and Demie weaponize this duplicity by giving a voice to the beautiful and damned. Fairy Tales is a collection of stories that uses the outlandish myths that many girls grew up reading to reveal an unspoken truth about being a woman in a world that aims to control her. As girls, we swallow the sugar-coated pill of society’s gender norms when we read about the magical romanticization of prince charming, kingdoms, dresses, and dances. Fairy Tales subverts these norms by lifting the taboos of such tales into the heart of the story: tantalizing seduction, erotic bondage, scandalizing clothes, unchecked agency, and female desire.

A sadness from unfulfilled desires and broken dreams lurks between the pages of Fairy Tales and spills into reality when we realize this otherworldly world closely resembles our own. We see an exploited sex worker in the dancing siren ridiculed as a monster by men for her body and sexuality. We see children undergoing intersex treatment and new mothers being given the husband stitch in the pain-ridden troll captured and exploited by doctors. We see doubted and unheard survivors of sexual violence in the water sprite covered in the inky slime of her inner darkness that left her feeling disgusting and worthless. We see the faces and stories of so many ordinary young girls that grew up reading folklore in the faces and stories of the magical creatures of Fairy Tales. They are incarnations of these creatures in another world.

© *Fairy Tales*, photographed by Petra Collins, text by Petra Collins and Alexa Demie. Rizzoli New York, 2021.

In this dark and wondrous world, they spin their own realities and fantasies into their reimagining of darker folklore, drawing out the sexualized undercurrent lurking beneath the surface of these childhood tales. Playing with agency and desire while blending beauty with the ugly and freaky, Collins and Demie build nine imaginary realms that upend beauty standards, gender norms, and our very understanding of fairy tales.

Fairytales is published by Rizzoli New York and is available for purchase here.