Crowned in Innocence: Threads of Identity

It is an expression of heritage, purity, and transformation. This collection captures the interplay between culture and individuality, between traditional symbolism and modern-day artistic imagination.

Their bold black-and-white portraits feature men with white pearls and beads draped over their bodies in folds of soft clothing that convey both fragility and strength. White beads against their dark skin have powerful contrast, symbolising the heavy yoke of inheritance that most users carry into narrative situations. Each portraiture tells a story—of identity, of fortitude, of little tendrils that weaves us to our past. Beaded ornamentation on metal pins Projects a sense of ritual and protection, of decoration. They refer to cultural signifiers of status, initiation, and belonging yet at the same time appropriate and transform so-called given gendered shapes.

A tribute at heart to the quiet strength and beauty of discovery, “Crowned in Innocence” is about venerating the past with boldness in stepping forward to the future, with one’s identity worn like a shield but also like a statement. The models, restrained in their postures of contemplation and rebellion, own up to the malleable nature of heritage—itself unaltered but perpetually in motion.

This series encourages people to think about their layers of identity, their inherited beauty, and how history and personal experience configure the language of self. By way of photography, “Crowned in Innocence” immortalizes these transitory instantiations, renders the ephemeral eternal, and permits identity to be questioned and celebrated.