This photoshoot was curated around a simple prop or fruit, the pomegranate. Little did I know, that we would capture such a balance of femininity with my subject, and the paradoxical pomegranate.

The pomegranate symbolizes life and fertility, blood and death, immortality, eternity, and resurrection to people as far afield, geographically as the Babylonians, Chinese, and Christianized Europeans. From Rabbis and popes, to kings and poets- they all made the fruit symbolic of "the one and the many, of multiplication and unity, the part and the whole."

The pomegranate is indigenous to modern-day Iran and Northern Africa, from where it spread throughout the Mediterranean region.

In Jewish tradition, pomegranates are traditionally eaten on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), as its believed that pomegranates have the same number of seeds as the 613 commandments of the Torah. Some scholars also believed that the pomegranate was the real "forbidden fruit" in the Garden of Eden.

In Roman times, pomegranate blossoms and fruits were worn as wreaths at spring festivities and other fertility celebrations. [1]

The pomegranate is known in the ancient Greek myth of Persephone. Persephone (daughter of Demeter, the goddess of harvest and fertility) was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. Persephone finds herself in his dark, underground palace without her companions. She falls into a deep melancholy, missing the birds and flowers and butterflies on the meadows above. As an apparent gesture of peace, Hades offers her twelve pomegranate seeds, six of which she eats. When the other gods come to retrieve her, they find that they have been tricked. ‘Persephone has eaten fruit from my kingdom’, says Hades, ‘so she is bound to me forever’. Because she has eaten six out of twelve seeds, her fate from now on is to spend six months of the year above ground and six below. As Steven Fry writes in his retelling of the Greek myths, this is how “the seasons came about, the autumn and winter of Demeter’s grieving for the absence of her daughter and the spring and summer of her jubilation at Persephone’s return”

For any adult imagination, the literal meaning of those pomegranate seeds is clearly to be interpreted sexually. Whether Hades gently seduced her or simply raped her as Greek gods sometimes do, or whether she discovered her own sexuality and fell in love with him in turn really depends on who is telling the story. But the pomegranate becomes a clear symbol of sexual awakening and speaks of the dual energies of sex, both losing something and gaining something in return, unifying violence and tenderness in acute love.

Persephone embodies this cyclical duality as she becomes, on the one hand, “the contented Queen of the Underworld, a loving consort who [holds] imperious sway over the dominion of death with her husband”, and on the other hand “revert[s] to the laughing Kore of fertility, flowers, fruit and frolic” for the remaining six months of the year.[5]

Persephone has a host of different names elsewhere in mythology and folklore: she is Sheherezade who saves her kingdom by entertaining the king with storytelling over the course of one thousand and one nights; she is the princess who is abducted by Rübezahl, a folkloric mountain spirit of the Krkonoše Mountains (Giant Mountains, Riesengebirge), a mountain range along the border between the historical lands of Bohemia and Silesia. [5]

A pomegranate, the Aphrodisiac of love, passion, and sensuality, also speaks of a very powerful and perhaps threatening knowledge: a liberating sense of sexual self-reflection and confidence, the very opposite of innocence. From this shoot, as well as another artist's shared ideation of femininity from the pomegranate ( shared here / Nora Kovat's work) I think we captured the embolic meanings of the Pomegranate with the modern day woman.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Three light set up here. I used the compact Geekoto GT-200's, with the Magmod strip box as my main light. Reflector GT200 with a 1/4th CTO gel underneath the table for more of a glow, and a flash image right with magsphere/grid.

Magmod discount code: GraphiCole

Photographer: Cole Harper/ GraphiCole
Model: Renee

Additional Sources:

Fry, Steven. 2018. MYTHOS: The Greek Myths Retold. United Kingdom: Penguin Random House UK.

Lack, H.W. 2001. A Garden Eden – Masterpieces of Botanical Illustration. Köln: TASCHEN GmbH.

Nozedar, A. 2010. Signs & Symbols Sourcebook. London: Harper Collins Publishers.

Ronnberg, A. [Editor in Chief]. 2011. Das Buch der Symbole. Köln: TASCHEN GmbH.

“Rübezahl”. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCbezahl [online].

Nora Kovat

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The Paradoxical Pomegranate

BEHIND THE SCENES

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