This piece has been decades in the making.

The statue stands outside the high school I attended in the 1980s, a fixture I walked past daily, barely noticing. Years later, after graduation and deep into my musical wanderings, I discovered European neofolk — that strange, ritualistic corner of Gothic-adjacent sound. The album covers struck me: stark, symbolic, mournful in ways I didn’t yet have words for.

I tucked those visuals away in the back of my mind, where they sat alongside memories of that silent statue and the cold clarity of adolescence.

Decades passed. I took up photography. I fell in love with black and white. I leaned into distortion, decay, contrast — all the little ways an image can shift meaning with the right treatment.

This is the result. A photo I took, reimagined in Photoshop to echo those old album sleeves — the ones that felt like prayer cards or forgotten relics. It’s a quiet homage to a time, a place, and a feeling that’s never really left me.