Natalie Aniela Dybisz (born 1986), known professionally as Miss Aniela, is a British fine-artfashion and surrealist photographer.[1][2][3][4]Selvedge describes her work as a "fus[ion of] traditional photography with digitally enhanced motifs and surrealism."[5]
Early life
Dybisz was born in 1986 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.[4] A self-taught photographer,[1][6] she began taking self-portraits at 15 but began focusing on it at 21 while studying English and Media at the University of Sussex.[2][4][7][8][9]
Dybisz started posting her self-portraits on Flickr in April 2006 and quickly garnered online popularity.[7] After leaving university, she assumed she wouldn't be able to commit fully or professionally to photography for another year or two at least.[10] Five months later, however, she was contacted by Microsoft and asked to speak at their Pro Photo Summit in Seattle about digital photography.[7][8] At this point, she decided to quit her job to pursue photography full-time.[10]
Photography
Dybisz utilizes models and practical effects in the first part of her process, then does digital post-production using Photoshop.[5][6] She is inspired by her environment, dreams, experiences, literature, and fine art, particularly 16th-century chiaroscuro artists, such as Caravaggio.[3][2][5][11][12] She has shot in mansion, castles, and stately homes in France and England, such as Château de Champlâtreux, and in other locations such as abandoned buildings.[13][11][3][12]Normal Magazine described her work as "combin[ing] baroque aesthetics and the directives of commercial work."[11]
Dybisz and her husband Matthew host the Fashion Shoot Experience, a workshop held in interesting shooting locations in London, Los Angeles, New York, Iceland, and other countries in Europe.[9][8][14] In 2010 and 2017, Dybisz was named "One to Watch" by the Saatchi Gallery in London.[15][16][17] She also teaches courses on photography and photoshop.[18][19] She has been featured in El País, NY Arts, Plastik Magazine, TechMag, American Photo, Playboy Spain, ALARM Magazine, and Vogue Italia.[9][7][12] Exhibition locations include Saatchi Gallery, Houses of Parliament, Waldemarsudde, and Vouge Italia's space in Milan.[12][5][9]Kai Mayfair and Hôtel de Crillon have also displayed her work.[20][15]
Dybisz's first professional exhibition was "locally in Brighton" while her Self-Gazing series of self-portraits were the first to be invited internationally.[8][12] The Ecology series was one of her earlier collections and showed the "relationship between humans and nature through visual references to pollution, deforestation and climate engineering."[17][8] In 2011, she started Surreal Fashion, which icanbecreative.com described as "where fashion meets fine art, beauty meets absurdity, and couture meets chaos."[17][21] In 2014, she did a fantasy photoshoot for Nikon[14] and released her Faces collection, which "merg[es] large-scale faces with hundreds of paintings from art history."[12] In 2017, she worked both on Barocco, a collection inspired by the Baroque and Rococo eras,[22] and Birth Undisturbed, a series about childbirth as an empowering experience for women worldwide.[23][17]
Dybisz's husband Matthew Lennard works with her under the Miss Aniela name.[8][5] The stillborn birth of their son Evan in 2013 inspired and informed her Birth Undisturbed series. They also have a daughter, born 2014/2015.[17][23]
