Fairytales: Petra Collins and Alexa Demie

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So I bought this for the photos (I would assume that many of us did lol) and I did not expect the writing to be that great… and I was correct. Alexa Demie is an actor, musician, and multi-hyphenate talent who currently stars as Maddy in HBO's Euphoria. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Petra posted a photograph of a fairy, and I wrote to her and said, ‘I want to be a fairy,’ and she was like, ‘Well, let’s make you a fairy,’” Demie says of the origins of their friendship, laughing. Their recent photo book "Fairy Tales" features Demie as nine different personas, including a faerie, siren, banshee and water sprite, as well as Hungarian legends like Tűz Anya (meaning'fire mother') that Collins grew up with.

Each of the nine tales is set in unique spaces, ranging from suburban homes and parking lots to fantastical sets. The photos combine elements of camp, prosthetics, and shibari in a surreal update to the imagery of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Perrault, and others.

This collaboration sees Alexa Demie embody empowered femme mythical beings in a world like ours today. Petra and Alexa’s chapters of elves, mermaids, sirens, water sprites, fallen angels, fairies, witches, and banshees blend their own stories with retold fairy tales. While Collins was mostly raised in the suburbs of Toronto, her mother fled Hungary in the 1980s, when it was still under Soviet rule.

This trope recurs throughout the book, challenging ideas of empowerment and restriction, symbolic of the patriarchy and our power to repurpose oppressive devices. honestly 4/5 stars still for the absolutely ethereal and fantastical photography but 0/5 for any words written on any page in this “erotic” book. Initially bought for the photos, obviously, so I didnt expect there to be multiple stories, and they honestly exceeded my expectations. Artist Petra Collins and actress Alexa Demie create nine erotic stories in a contemporary reimagining of a fairy tale book.Petra and Alexa s chapters of elves, mermaids, sirens, water sprites, fallen angels, fairies, witches, and banshees blend their own stories with retold fairy tales. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to watch Disney, but I grew up on Hungarian folk tales,” she says. It felt half-baked, stories obviously being made up afterwards in an attempt to form some sort of narrative for each photo series in each chapter.