The photography of young French artist Ines Kozic is hard to overlook. Hailing from Lyon, the 22-year-old dancer and professional model, who is currently a postgraduate student at the school of Fine Arts in the French city of Rennes, has been capturing images using her father’s camera from a young age. Kozic’s photography, a body of work of disarming simplicity with a character all of its own, is inspired by fairytales and body ornamentation like jewellery and tattoos. In an interview, Kozic states that she was always fond of cabins, barns and the outdoors for staging her shootings, an affinity that continues in her current work. She is also inspired by post-mortem photography, a practice which involves taking pictures of the recently deceased - usually dressed up and decorated with flowers. Such an influence inevitably lends Kozic’s work a macabre overtone, with the dead insects and bones that she uses to decorate young human bodies in some of the works becoming an allegory of the natural circle of life. In a similar way, the young women seen in her work weaving their long, beautiful hair into everyday objects look as if they are symbolically consuming and spending their youth and beauty. Capturing the essence of something as dark as neo-gothic art without using its numerous clichés is by itself impressive for an artist this young — we’ll definitely be looking forward to seeing more of Ines Kozic’s work in the future!