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Possibly Supernatural, Surely Today's Most Inspiring Artist

“Vampire photographer”?  “Archaeologist of the soul”?  Some artists figuratively “walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”  Nadine Dinter of Berlin very literally does, and she has the pictures to prove it.  Outside of her day job, her work as a necropolis photographer, recording artist, perfumer, and model invariably touches upon love and death, beauty and decay, doom and elation, mourning and resurrection.  You’ve heard of human energy fields, but Nadine seeks to capture the auras of statues and the uncanny glamor of hidden doorways and atmospheric pathways in the gothic world she navigates.  Then, her music and her perfume ensure a richly sensual experience of her visual work.  These are just some of the reasons Nadine Dinter is being called the most inspiring artist working today.  But let’s dive deeper into her world.

In the process of sharing her creativity online and in art galleries, Nadine teaches, too, by helping her audience to understand how a photographer sees the world and how the composition of a shot can utterly transform the viewer’s reaction to a scene. She even offers videos of locations, to give a sense of the greater environment before showing the still photograph she ultimately captured.  More context is offered in the captions, including historical backgrounds as well as notes on easily missed details, symbolism, and Nadine’s own emotional experience of each place.  The viewer is invited to see through Nadine’s eyes, even while learning to discern with more sensitivity.

As an independent creator, Nadine has her hands in a lot of pots, or more like one big cauldron that encompasses the artistic witchery of her many-faceted world.  Let’s seek to better understand how all the elements began to coalesce: 

1. Nadine began traveling to Paris and Madrid to explore sculpture photography in the late 1990s.  By 2024, that genre had merged with model portraiture into a "TransMutation" series.  Her photography of cemetery statuary is frequently exhibited in galleries such as this one.  

2. Last year, to add an acoustic dimension to her work, she became a gothic recording artist called d1ntr, collaborating with the post-punk band Hex Formes.  Her lyrics and vocals are rooted in the emotions that spring from life’s transformations, addressing her holistic approach to turning pain into beauty, darkness into light.

3. This year, to capture the moods and smells of the statuary gardens and cemeteries she visits, so as to bring more dimensions to the sensual experience of her photography, she crafted a signature scent, “TransMutations,” through the Warsaw perfume lab Mo61.

4. As a muse to other artists, she has inspired songs like “Vampyre Everything” by Scott Baker Graham and imagery by Boris Eldagsen.

5. As a supporter of fellow artists, she began conducting interviews in 2019 (such as this one with Paolo Ventura).

6. As a collector of exotic jewelry selected and collected from all over the world, she makes guest appearances (as in this episode of Grave Mood Rings).  Most of her rings feature pentagrams, scarabs and snakes, tied to her fascination with ancient Egypt. 

7. Simultaneously, as a model, Nadine has been compared to Isabella Rossellini and has posed for photographers like Greg Gorman, George Holz, Thomas Karsten, Martin Eder, Boris Eldagsen, Catrine Val, Just Loomis, Katja Ruge, Steven Kohlstock, Gerhard Kassner, Felix Lammers and others.  Eder's portrait was recently used for the album cover "Tales of Immortality." This portrait by fellow cemetery photographer and darkwave scene promoter DominiQ.D is a personal favorite of mine.

Even while juggling so very many projects, Nadine is friendly, accessible, outgoing, and proactively helpful to others.  She truly lives by her motto, “consult, communicate, connect,” as I learned firsthand when she first reached out to me via her Instagram to express supportiveness of my own indie endeavors.

Photo credits: © Greg Gorman (top portrait), Boris Eldagsen (snake portrait), Felix Lammers (graffiti portrait).  By permission.

—Hailed by the art world as the most unusual scholar working today, Craig Conley fled academia to author Weiser Books' Magic Words: A Dictionary, HarperCollins' One-Letter Words: A Dictionary, and The Young Wizard's Hexopedia. Even more esoteric publications include Books of the Dead, Magic Archetypes, The Care and Feeding of a Spirit Board, Seance Parlor Feng Shui, How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook, Heirs to the Queen of Hearts: Tracing Magical Genealogy, Astrogalomancy, The One-Minute Mystic, and Divination by Punctuation. His work has been profiled in the New York Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, Publishers Weekly, The Associated Press, and dozens of others.

From our outpost at Spacey Panda Music:

Do THIS to Be Remembered as an Artist of Originality

The Japanese painter Korin, who lived until 1716, is famous for having blazed a trail "that seemed designed to thwart any would-be followers" (Mizuo Hiroshi, Edo Painting, 1972).  Followers here refers to adopters of Korin's style and/or students of his technique, but it can also mean one's champions and enthusiasts.  And there, in a nutshell, is the secret to being remembered as an artist of originality: express such peculiarity as to be inimitable even by your own biggest supporters, and also don't give your admirers a second thought.  That's not advice that's necessarily easy to adopt in a flash, but might not its achievement be the key to securing one's legacy?  To be unattainable elsewhere — that's the definition of "exclusive," and surely it's a goal for any artist.  Another definition of "exclusive" is "excluding," as Korin did his would-be followers.  What a solitary path!  But that's no surprise, is it?  Every true artist is a trailblazer, and the way is narrow when we stand upon the trembling margin of a new world.

What is effortless, actually, is finding one's singular artistry.  That's because it's always at the core of your very being — it doesn't have to be discovered but rather unfettered by externally imposed overlays that may be masking it.  Just as no two singing voices are identical, every artistic vision is one-of-a-kind, as long as it doesn't lazily emulate those who came before.  It's inevitable for an artist to have idols, and those idols very likely direct one toward one's own singularity (meaning that if you resonate with another artist, it's because there are aspects in that person's work that are stepping stones on your own path toward originality).  But consider someone like filmmaker Brian De Palma making blatantly Hitchcockian thrillers — De Palma homages his hero, which is a lovely gesture, but isn't it Hitchcock himself who will be remembered as the true original?  The two most effortless ways to untangle yourself from your models and free your voice are to pay attention to your dreams and to meditate (if not formal meditation then the Zen practice of "just sitting" quietly for periods of time).  

To cite an example close to home, as an electronic musician with the band Neons Gone Mad, I didn't wish to blur into the background of all my biggest influences, so I sought to create a hitherto unknown genre characterized by a haunted grandfather clock connected by a thread of cobweb to a Tesla spirit radio.  Clockwork rhythms, eerie bells, and ghostly voices from the aether accompany synthesized melodies and lyrics representative of my idiosyncratic angle on life.  The overall effect is unique, instantly recognizable, and nigh impossible to be imitated.  To be clear, this new genre wasn't forced simply to be something weird and different.  The inspiration for it came naturally, as the genre simply distilled several of my interests (time-bending, Tesla inventions, Spiritualism, ghost detection, experimental soundscapes, mechanical/industrial noise, synthpop) into a theretofore unknown synthesis.  Like the work of David Lynch, Neons Gone Mad isn't for everyone, but we've been commissioned by artists around the world for haunted clockwork remixes, like Sigfus of Denmark, Archmage Band in Australia, Bearcraft in the United Kingdom, and Wunderfish in Hawaii.  Yes, we're still working on "don't give your admirers a second thought."  It's a process.