© Black and white film photography by Rhea Catada

Over the years, I’ve psychoanalysed myself through writing. This predated my realisation that I actually needed to seek professional help. I once called it “exorcising my demons through writing,” and often did so on public blogs, albeit anonymously. There was something cathartic about excavating what’s inside of me and putting it out on the internet.

This is the first time I’ve done something similar, exposing my inner world through a lens that captured the environment around me. Perhaps this is how I see the world. It can be dark and isolating. Even on the brightest of days, the shadows seem to warn that the light won’t last.

Photographed in Poland, Denmark, and Ukraine between winter and spring 2026, using a secondhand film camera I bought in a small basement shop in Kyiv. Photos are accompanied by Sylvia Plath’s words from her poem “The Moon and the Yew Tree.”

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

Fumy spiritious mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

How I would like to believe in tenderness –

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way.

Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.

Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.

The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

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© Rhea Catada