PARAMIND is an abstract photo series that explores negative space and colorful shadows to evoke a ghost-like, dreamlike atmosphere. Captured with my Canon Rebel T5i and edited in Lightroom, the images were later compiled into a mini-zine using InDesign, with the cover illustration drawn in Photoshop.

The project was inspired by Bygones, a poem by American writer Marina Keegan, a Yale student who tragically passed away in a car accident just five days after graduating at age twenty-two. Her poem speaks to the quiet beauty of the mundane and the value of presence over ambition—an ethos I carried into this series.

The photographs invite the viewer into my room during the early morning hours, where light spills gently across walls and objects, transforming the ordinary into the otherworldly. Through soft shadows and ephemeral compositions, PARAMIND attempts to capture the fragile space between the real and the imagined.

The title comes from a made-up word in Bon Iver’s song “29 #Strafford Apts.”—a combination of the prefix “para-” (meaning beside, beyond, or outside of) and “mind”—suggesting a mental state that drifts beyond rationality. That sense of quiet disassociation and nocturnal reflection is central to the emotional tone of this work.

This project remains one of my personal favorites, as it captures the subtle beauty of the banal while holding onto the fleeting feeling of existing somewhere between physical reality and an undefined, ethereal space.