Evan Butterfield

I've always been surrounded by photography. Ancestral relatives who could barely scratch out a living on dirt farms in the back-hills of Missouri somehow managed to have photos taken of their hardscrabble faces. My grandfather was a small-town professional photographer, specializing in gauzy, hand-tinted portraits of pretty Gladiolus Festival Queens and beaming local brides, and I used to spend hours as a small child inhaling the aromatic chemical scents in his darkroom. My great-uncle was an aerial photo analyst in WWII, and my father, not one to take retirement sitting down, is a photographer for a small-town suburban Chicago newspaper. My husband is an avid photographer himself, and he’s the one who gave me my first real camera more years ago than I care to admit to, so this is all probably his fault. Really, though, there was never any question of escape.

My photographic work has evolved over the years from elaborate Steampunk characters to a more strange and unique style that defies strict genre classification. Combining the erotic with dark fantasy and the absurd, the natural with the artificial, I use antique, unexpected, and found objects to create the unusual and intriguing masks, headpieces, and eyewear that define an odd and slightly disturbing world.