There’s a glass slipper left behind on a rock, half submerged in the water of a stream. It’s not Cinderella’s, after the ball, or maybe it is, but told from a point of view the classic fairy tale never dared to show. This is where Fairy Tales begins, the personal project by Catalan photographer Clara Fortuny, in which childhood’s most familiar stories are taken apart and handed back as adult imagery, sensual, at times unsettling.

Fortuny has spent years working at the crossroads of fashion photography, still life and storytelling, moving easily between digital and film (35 and 120mm), and in Fairy Tales that dual nature, technical and narrative, comes through clearly. There are no captions explaining which fairy tale we’re looking at: a detail, an object, a gesture is enough. A hand covered in black tar stroking the face of a copper-haired girl lying on a rug patterned like a storybook Orient. A woman clutching a red apple while her own reflection multiplies, warped, across a rippling water surface.

Clara Fortuny’s work moves within what she herself calls a dreamlike universe suspended between the aesthetic and the strange, a signature running through much of her artistic output, where identity, beauty and femininity are constantly reinterpreted. In Fairy Tales, that approach finds natural ground: fairy tales have always been stories that teach through fear and desire, and Clara Fortuny chooses to bring back exactly that, the moral ambiguity, the danger, the pull toward what we shouldn’t touch, without softening it for an adult audience that already knows these stories by heart.

The vivid color palette, another hallmark of her photography, collides here with dark, tension-filled settings: the red of the apple and the nail polish against the black of the staining hand, the warmth of skin against the darkness of the forest. It’s photography that doesn’t illustrate the fairy tale, but questions it, asking what’s left of these stories once their innocence is stripped away.