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.