Ancient Priestess

[greenkira]

Last month I did a shoot in Ankara with model Özge Can pos­ing in a chi­ton, a dress com­mon to women through­out the ancient Mediter­ranean, at the Roman Baths archae­o­log­i­cal site. Özge is work­ing on a master’s degree in envi­ron­men­tal engi­neer­ing and does mod­el­ing as a hobby, and we con­nected via Model Mayhem.

I’ve been think­ing about writ­ing more about where the ideas for these shoots come from, so here goes:

At the begin­ning of the2008 Sum­mer Olympics, Greece hired some actresses to dress as ancient priest­esses for the torch light­ing cer­e­mony. After I saw the pho­tos, I wanted to do a sim­i­lar shoot! (But with garb that didn’t look like it started life as cur­tains.) I’d actu­ally done a Roman look shoot before, though it was in 2000 on a 1.3 megapixel cam­era (which cost $600 then…) and had a blast with it.

In Jan­u­ary, when the school I work at was on win­ter break, I went down to the Mediter­ranean coast by Antalya with the inten­tion of doing some shoots in the area’s ruined Greco-Roman cities. I was hop­ing to find a model to pose for me there and put the cos­tume together before leav­ing. It didn’t work out but I did find Özge’s pro­file and instantly thought of Michael Whelan’s paint­ing “Night’s Daugh­ter”. She liked the shoot con­cept so we worked out meet­ing later in the spring.

The Roman Baths in Ankara are an open air museum with ruins dat­ing from when ancient Ancyra was the cap­i­tal of Gala­tia, then an eth­ni­cally Celtic part of Ana­to­lia. (I was flab­ber­gasted to learn the area had a Celtic his­tory; for some rea­son I’d always thought Gala­tia was in ancient Gaul/ mod­ern France, not - of all places - Turkey.) In addi­tion to the foun­da­tions of the baths them­selves, there are col­lec­tions of tombs, mar­ble pil­lars, and both Greek and Roman way­stones dat­ing from the ancient past. Since the site is on a slop­ing hill, shoot­ing from a low angle allowed me to hide the mod­ern city sur­round­ing us.

Finally, allow me to rec­om­mend Özge to any­one need­ing a Gothic-look model. We did this shoot on a trade-for-images basis but she’s look­ing for com­mer­cial work and would be very happy to travel. Her Eng­lish is excel­lent and she was delight­ful to work with. Con­tact her via Model May­hem or DeviantArt.

Gallery of images from the shoot. Click any image for prints and pric­ing.

Ozge - Ancient Priest­ess shoot - Images by Kira Hagen

Originally published at Seeking the World's Soul. You can comment here or there.