ELIZA SHIVA is a self-taught fine-art photographer and poet whose work traces the tender seam where beauty meets brutality. Born in New Hampshire in 2007, she began making photographs after relocating to southwestern Florida at the age of fourteen. A recent homeschooled graduate shaped by an art-and-nature-based curriculum, she now lives with her family on a small farm in the Arkansas River Valley.
Working primarily in black and white, Shiva captures the raw rituals of rural life, where innocence bends toward grief, and the sacred flickers through flesh, fur, and bone. Her images are not staged but witnessed, drawn from daily life and charged with the still urgency of memory.
The Pasticheur marks her first publication. More of her work may be found on her VSCO account.
Artist Statement
My photographs emerge from the daily stillness and brutality of rural Arkansas, where tenderness and violence coexist without apology. I work in black and white to strip the world of its distractions, leaving only form, gesture, and grief. These are portraits of innocence shadowed by inevitability: a childhood folding into time, a ritual of flesh and fur, a divine presence glimpsed in the small, raw acts of living and dying.
I am drawn to moments where the sacred and the mundane collide: a bird pegged to a line, a boy’s hand on a skinned carcass, a dog standing sentinel before death. These images are not staged; they are witnessed. They carry the urgency of memory in real time, the kind that doesn’t wait to be interpreted.
My intention is not to provoke but to unearth, to invite reflection on the fragile contract between body and spirit, between humanity and the natural world we depend on and consume. I hope viewers recognize themselves in the quiet brutality, the half-lit mercy, and the fleeting divinity of these scenes.
This is my South, lonesome, lovely, and ending.
