Photo Project : The Tarot Queen by Manab Das

In the stillness between shadow and light, I found myself becoming something more than just a performer—I became a vessel. A conduit for the unseen. A Tarot Queen.

This photo essay is a visual record of a mystical collaboration with the immensely talented Manab Das, an artist whose lens captures not just images, but energy. Our paths crossed with a shared fascination for the occult, the unspoken, the in-between. We envisioned a project that would not simply show drag, but summon it—through mood, hue, and presence.

The aesthetic was clear from the beginning: a world washed in blue and grey, tones that whisper of secrets, moons, and memory. A space where boundaries blur—between gender, body, time, and spirit. These weren’t just colors; they were states of mind. And I let myself melt into them.

For this shoot, I invoked a specific form of drag I’ve been developing: stranimal drag. It is a rejection of the polished, the pretty, the perfect. It leans into the distorted, the creaturely, the dreamlike. This form allows me to tap into something primal and prophetic—like pulling the Tower card when you expected the Lovers. It unsettles to awaken.

Each piece of the look—every object, every gesture—was chosen intuitively, guided not by trend but by tarot. I moved through the studio not as myself, but as a card in motion: sometimes the High Priestess, veiled in blue intuition; sometimes the Hermit, cloaked in solitude; sometimes the Moon, reflecting and refracting all at once.

What Manab and I created together was not just a visual—it was a ritual. A quiet invocation of the mystic. The photographs that emerged feel like lost pages from a forgotten oracle deck, where drag is not performance but prophecy.

This collaboration reminded me of the sacredness in stillness. Of how drag doesn’t always have to shout—it can also whisper, dream, dissolve. In this project, I didn’t pose. I channeled.

To step into the Tarot Queen is to step out of certainty and into knowing. It is to let your body be the card, your eyes the message, your drag the divine.

May these images guide you, haunt you, hold you—like a reading that lingers long after the cards have been shuffled back