Walk into one of Samantha Everton’s photographs, and you’re walking into a dream. An Australian fine art photographer with a flair for theatrical staging, Everton creates images that feel like they belong to secret stories you half-remember from childhood — lush, uncanny, brimming with symbolism you can’t quite pin down.

Her work sits at the edge of reality and fantasy. She builds elaborate sets, often in old houses or custom-constructed rooms, dressing her scenes in vivid fabrics, vintage furniture, and props that seem plucked from a fever dream. Children appear frequently — wide-eyed girls perched in velvet armchairs, or frozen mid-movement in corridors painted candy pink and deep teal. These girls are never passive; they’re luminous, unsettling, sometimes ghostly, sometimes fierce.

Everton’s acclaimed series, like Vintage Dolls and Marionettes, bend the domestic space into a stage for the subconscious. She draws on her own upbringing in a multicultural family — she was adopted into a household alongside siblings of various backgrounds — and infuses her work with layered reflections on cultural identity, innocence, and the performance of femininity.

There’s a cinematic tension in her photos: something just happened, or something is about to happen. A porcelain-faced child floats in a tub of bright red water; another, wearing a paper crown, stands alone in an empty room while confetti rains down. Nothing is quite explained — and that’s the point. These images feel like the moment before you wake up, when the story starts to blur but the mood stays behind.

Everton’s meticulous staging is matched by her painterly use of color. Reds, greens, pale blues — she uses them to heighten the sense of the surreal, as if the very air in the room is charged with possibility. She has said her images come to her fully formed, like scenes from a film unspooling in her mind. The magic happens when she brings these fleeting visions into the physical world, piece by piece, prop by prop, light by light.

In an era when so much photography leans into rawness and spontaneity, Everton’s work stands as a reminder that there’s power in artifice too — in carefully conjured illusions that tap into truths too slippery for words. Each photograph is its own little theatre, inviting you to wander through its shadows and saturated light, piecing together your own narrative as you go.