Maria Daniel Balcazar on the Beauty of Eden

When we saw the submission from Maria Daniel Balcazar for the Edan Magnum Square Print Photo Sale, we were quite amazed at it. It literally looked like something that was in ode to the garden of Eden and appeared to be like a story that wasn’t told at all. So that’s what we had to ask about.

The lead image is by Maria Daniel Balcazar and is used with permission. This photo is available for purchase as part of the current Magnum Square Print Sale that ends on October 27, 2024.

Here’s what Maria Daniel Balcazar told us:

This image, Bloom from the Earth’s Soil, was inspired by Julia de Burgos’ poem: “I was my own route”, in which she writes “… I felt myself a blossom of all the soils of the earth, of the soils without history”.
I see Eden as the womb of mother-earth, and as such, the warm, nurturing source of life of both the plant and the animal kingdom.
Lilith and Eve represent together the birth of humanity, as an intertwined, nuanced will to be born, and to blossom as autonomous beings, yet interdependent with the elements and all creatures of the same mother-nature.
Lilith symbolizes the vital impulse for independence, as in “I was my own route”; Eve embodies the sense of wonder for life, thirst for knowledge, and thus the conscious acceptance of the inherent joys and hardships “… of all the soils of the earth …”.

Maria Daniel Balcazar

When we asked about the image, we kind of thought of both Eve and Lilith. From Maria’s response, it seems like she was more intrigued by the idea of Lilith. In various tales, she was Adam’s first husband and cast out of the Garden of Eden. But most people do not know her tale as much as they know Eve’s. In fact, it isn’t even told as often.

As the Editor in Chief of this website, I’ve interviewed tons of people who turn to nature for their inspiration. And that’s exactly where this is coming from, too. But it’s one of the few times that it’s been done in black and white while also being so simple. At the same time, the execution is so perfect and brilliant. It’s easy to feel what’s coming from this image when we think of the idea of Eden. Otherwise, I’d think of it as one of the mythological tales of people being birthed from the Earth.

I adore the fact that Maria Daniel Balcazar took inspiration from a poem. I think that this is incredibly important as too much photography these days takes inspiration from other visual media. And it needs to stop in order for us to start making more unique and different work. Otherwise, we’re all just copying one another and Generative AI can do the same thing. But it has yet to be able to do something with pure originality the way that humans can.

In many ways, this is peak human photography in that it finds inspiration from written media which then makes our minds work in a specific way to create the image.