The most evocative portraits don’t always feature people. Sometimes, the deepest stories are captured through symbols, subtle gestures, or objects that carry emotional gravity. One such image is Dana Stirling’s Butterfly, July 2020, a haunting photograph from her series Why Am I Sad, which emerged during a time of collective stillness and internal reckoning.
This quiet, poignant photograph doesn’t demand attention—it invites contemplation. It whispers instead of shouts, its voice carried through a single, fragile insect and a hand that barely moves. There is no face, no gaze to meet, yet the emotional landscape within the frame is vivid and raw. It is a visual elegy, a symbolic echo of what 2020 meant for so many: isolation, reflection, vulnerability, and the aching hope for something gentle amidst chaos.
The story behind this photograph began not in a studio, but on a desolate road—unplanned, instinctive, and ultimately, unforgettable.
An Unscripted Moment on an Empty Road
In the breathless stillness of mid-2020, as the global pandemic redefined how time moved and how silence settled, life became a string of surreal days. Cities quieted, movement slowed, and the sense of normality that once anchored daily life was gently erased. For Dana Stirling and her husband, Yoav, the weight of confinement had grown heavy. Seeking distance from urban chaos and the mental fog that had crept in, they took to the open road, hoping for air, stillness, and some brief return to feeling grounded.
As they followed a winding rural stretch, something small and easily missable interrupted the monotony of the pavement. Dana, always alert to small, poetic disruptions, saw it before they passed it entirely.
“It was early July, during the heart of the pandemic,” she recalls. “The air was heavy—not just from the heat but with the uncertainty that had crept into every corner of life. We were desperate for a break, something simple. When I saw the shape in the road, I didn’t know what it was. I’ve seen roadkill before, sticks, leaves, even a tarantula once. But this time, it was different. There was something unusually quiet about it.”
They stopped the car. Dana stepped out. What she found was a butterfly—still, immaculate, and lifeless. Its wings, delicate and unmarred, were spread as if it had only just rested there. It was untouched by the elements, unscarred by passing tires, as if the world had pressed pause the moment it landed.
That still butterfly mirrored the world outside: beautiful, arrested, uncertain. A single delicate life, captured in a state of eerie preservation, perfectly reflecting the suspended reality of the year.
The Accidental Memento
Dana had not set out to collect anything that day. The trip wasn’t meant to be productive or even creatively driven. It was simply a way to breathe. But the butterfly’s condition—a strange, pristine stillness—felt sacred somehow. She couldn’t leave it behind. She had no specimen container, no tools for collection, just an empty Pringles can tucked away in the car.
“There was something about the moment that felt ceremonial,” she later reflected. “The butterfly was flawless, and even though I’ve kept insects before—bees in jars, tiny creatures preserved in glass—this one was different. There was a tenderness about it. It didn’t feel like just another find. It felt like a message, a presence.”
Without fanfare, she gently placed the butterfly into the can, improvising a kind of reliquary. For weeks, she didn’t touch it. It sat in its temporary home, waiting in silence, much like the world beyond her windows. And as the days blurred into each other—marked by rising case counts, anxious news cycles, and nights that felt interminable—that butterfly remained a small, sacred waiting space. It became more than a dead insect. It became a quiet companion, a symbol, a reminder of something Dana couldn’t yet name.
That small act—of stopping, noticing, and choosing to preserve—initiated a process far larger than its appearance suggested. It became the emotional and symbolic seed for what would grow into one of her most intimate and affecting pieces.
Holding Space for Stillness
Weeks later, in the dense emotional air of her apartment, Dana finally felt it was time to make the image. But how to capture something so quiet, so potent? She didn’t rush. She allowed herself to interact with the butterfly, to sit with its presence. She experimented—first with window light, then composition. She positioned it gently on a sill, trying to listen to the feeling it conveyed. But something still didn’t settle.
“It didn’t feel real yet,” Dana explained. “It was beautiful, yes. The natural light, the backdrop—it all made sense on a technical level. But emotionally, it didn’t resonate.”
Then she decided to hold it.
The image shifted completely. Her hand, soft and steady, became part of the story. Suddenly the butterfly wasn’t just seen—it was felt. It became not just a specimen, but something being cradled, something mourned, something remembered. The dynamic between object and holder created a quiet emotional exchange. The fragile insect and the still hand mirrored each other—both vulnerable, both suspended in time.
That moment of human contact infused the image with something deeper than aesthetic appeal—it became a gesture of reverence, a physical connection to emotional weight. It was not just a composition. It was an act of emotional translation.
A Home Weighted by Memory
The backdrop of the image—the apartment where Dana and Yoav had spent much of 2020—was not chosen for any visual reason. It simply was. It was the space where life had contracted, where time had stalled, and where everything felt too close yet too far away.
The walls of that apartment had witnessed exhaustion, displacement, and a deep sense of rootlessness. The air there was heavy with memory—not dramatic, but persistent. Each corner held traces of silence, of conversations left unfinished, of breath held too long. It was a space that didn’t nurture comfort, but instead forced confrontation.
To hold the butterfly in that environment made the image even more visceral. The photograph was no longer just a record—it became a relic. Not of the butterfly’s death, but of Dana’s own internal landscape during a year defined by isolation and reflection.
It wasn’t a constructed scene. It was a lived-in reality. The lighting was natural, the setting unaltered. The moment was not rehearsed, but inhabited.
The Emotional Weight of Lightness
The process of photographing the butterfly required not just technical precision, but emotional presence. Dana used her Mamiya RZ 67, a medium format camera known for its clarity and depth. She chose a 110mm lens with a wide aperture to create a shallow field, ensuring that the butterfly would be in focus while the background dissolved into soft blur.
But the real challenge wasn’t technical.
“There was a strange disquiet in holding something so weightless,” Dana noted. “The butterfly didn’t even register in my palm, yet I felt consumed by its presence. It demanded total stillness, total care.”
Her husband Yoav helped with framing, positioning, making sure Dana’s hand was steady and centered. The collaboration was quiet, intuitive. They didn’t need to speak much. It was a shared moment of attentiveness—two people working together to preserve something that couldn’t be saved.
This paradox—the heaviness of something that weighed nothing—imbued the image with a spiritual gravity. It wasn’t just about composition. It was about presence, attention, and the emotional labor of honoring stillness.
Objects as Vessels of Identity
Dana has long used inanimate objects as stand-ins for personal emotion. Her archive includes dolls in jars, fractured toys, and discarded items placed with solemn care. She rarely photographs people, and almost never herself. But through her work, we see her—reflected not in faces, but in metaphors.
Butterfly, July 2020 follows this lineage, but deepens it. The butterfly, though not human, becomes deeply humanized. It stands not only for loss or transformation, but for Dana herself—her fragility, her stasis, her quiet resistance in a time of global upheaval.
“I often think of my images as self-portraits, even though I’m not in them,” Dana said. “I use these symbols to express what I can't say or show with a face. The butterfly was me—still, displaced, but trying to hold onto something meaningful.”
In this way, the image becomes a mirror. It reflects back not only Dana’s emotional state, but our own. It becomes a canvas for projection, for recognition, for quiet solidarity.
Breathing Room in a Confining Space
In the still, uncertain months of 2020, spaces that once felt familiar turned oppressive. Homes became both sanctuary and prison. For Dana Stirling, the apartment she shared with her husband Yoav became a place where time bent strangely—a space heavy with silence, memory, and the slow erosion of what used to feel like routine. It was within this emotionally saturated environment that she began to confront the butterfly again, now not as a specimen, but as a stand-in for something more intimate.
The apartment was compact, dimly lit during certain hours, and filled with the echoes of suspended days. Dana had spent much of the year within its confines, absorbing the anxiety of a world unraveling, the heaviness of news cycles, and the internal tug of displacement. It wasn’t just about physical confinement—it was psychological, existential.
Amid that emotional haze, Dana decided to finally engage with the butterfly she had kept safe for weeks. It wasn’t a casual choice; it was the beginning of a slow, deliberate process of reconnecting with her creative instincts. She explored settings and surfaces, working intuitively. The windowsill seemed logical—natural light, a clean frame—but something was missing.
“I placed it on the sill, hoping the soft light would carry the weight I felt. But it didn’t land right,” she said. “The image looked nice, but it didn’t move me. It felt like I was avoiding the truth.”
Then she tried something simple—she held it.
That decision changed the entire tone of the work. Her hand became part of the image. No longer a backdrop or supporting element, it was now the vessel, the emotional core. The butterfly, no longer staged or isolated, was embraced. The moment transformed from an exercise in visual aesthetics to a moment of personal truth.
Translating Emotion Into Stillness
The act of holding the butterfly was a delicate intersection of restraint and emotion. It was no longer about creating a beautiful image, but about listening to what the moment asked of her. Her hand, careful and still, did not overpower the butterfly. It supported it with quiet reverence, as if she were holding time itself.
In that gesture, Dana expressed an entire spectrum of unspoken emotion—grief, tenderness, surrender, stillness. The butterfly became a vessel not just of memory, but of metamorphosis, suspended in the space between farewell and preservation. What was once just an insect became a symbolic echo of the fragility she felt inside.
The room around her, once stifling, became almost cathedral-like in its silence. It was as though the apartment allowed that one honest moment to breathe. The photograph she was creating was not built in a studio or under curated light, but within the imperfect, confined walls of her own life. It was honest. It was rooted.
This convergence of object, space, and emotion gave the image its soul. It was less a photograph and more a testimonial—an offering to the idea that beauty can exist quietly, even amid emotional debris.
The Precision of Holding Still
Composing the final image was a technical and spiritual endeavor. The butterfly’s fragile anatomy made the process feel almost ritualistic. Every gesture mattered. Dana knew that even a gust of breath or the subtle tremor of her fingers could disturb its perfectly preserved wings. Her movements had to be intentional, slow, and deliberate.
“There was a strange duality in that moment,” Dana recalled. “The butterfly weighed nothing, but it felt like I was holding something monumental. I couldn’t breathe too deeply. I had to be present with every muscle.”
She chose her Mamiya RZ 67—a trusted medium-format film camera known for its capacity to render extraordinary detail. The 110mm lens she used allowed her to keep the butterfly in sharp relief while allowing the rest of the frame to fall away into a soft, dreamy blur. This shallow depth of field served more than just a technical purpose—it metaphorically isolated the moment, turning it into a suspended world of its own.
Yoav helped gently with her hand placement, ensuring her gesture remained composed. The collaboration was nonverbal and instinctive. It was a kind of quiet choreography—a meditation performed with trust, restraint, and unspoken understanding.
A Symbolic Gesture of Intimacy
The final photograph did not just depict a butterfly. It encapsulated an emotional vocabulary that transcended language. It showed stillness not as a void, but as an intentional, charged presence. It echoed with the emotions of that year: isolation, quiet despair, longing, and the cautious hope of holding on.
In her earlier works, Dana often explored themes of fragility, memory, and identity using inanimate objects—worn dolls, cracked figurines, jars filled with ephemeral things. But this image pushed those themes into even more intimate territory. Her hand became not just a part of the composition—it became the narrative itself.
What she captured was not just an object in space, but a relationship: between artist and symbol, between grief and gentleness, between mortality and care. The photograph became a form of nonverbal expression, a soft mirror reflecting her internal landscape during a moment of global and personal reckoning.
It felt more like a private ceremony than a creative project—a solemn communion between self and symbol.
Fragility as Strength
The butterfly, though lifeless, radiated with a quiet vitality. It was no longer an insect—it had become emblematic. It held paradoxes: it was dead, but it spoke of endurance; it was silent, yet filled with resonance. In Dana’s hand, it seemed both impossibly small and monumentally important.
There’s power in recognizing fragility—not as a weakness, but as a vital truth. The ability to hold something so delicate without breaking it requires grace, intention, and vulnerability. And in creating that image, Dana invited the viewer to share in that exact moment—to join her in that breathless stillness.
This wasn’t an image that imposed emotion; it gently extended it. Its resonance lies not in spectacle, but in the space it creates. It doesn’t instruct the viewer what to feel—it simply asks them to pause, to hold their breath, and to feel whatever emerges.
The butterfly became a metaphor for the invisible emotions so many carried in 2020—quiet losses, unspoken fears, delicate hopes. Through one intimate gesture, Dana gave form to what had otherwise remained formless.
A Moment Carved in Memory
There is a distinct type of memory that doesn’t shout—it whispers. It hides in the corners of rooms, in the texture of ordinary objects, in moments too small to notice until they’re gone. This is the kind of memory Dana captured.
The hand holding the butterfly became a symbol of suspended time. The blur surrounding it suggested a world that no longer mattered, a world out of focus, while the subject remained piercingly real. The contrast mirrored how many experienced life during the pandemic—foggy, fragmented, but punctuated by sharply intimate moments.
Every element of the image—the natural light, the muted tones, the softness of the background—contributed to its emotional architecture. It was not designed to impress. It was designed to reveal.
By trusting her instincts, Dana created not just a photograph, but a visual poem—one composed of silence, reverence, and extraordinary care.
The Emotional Residue of an Image
Long after the frame was captured, its presence lingered. It became a personal artifact for Dana and a universal touchstone for viewers. The image invited introspection, reminding us of the power of stillness and the importance of witnessing fragile things without trying to fix or explain them.
Its enduring power comes from its humility. It doesn’t boast significance. It allows significance to be felt. In holding the butterfly, Dana also held space—for memory, for mourning, for gentleness in an impatient world.
That moment—rooted in discomfort, intimacy, and emotional sincerity—continues to echo. The image now exists beyond the apartment, beyond the constraints of 2020. It has become timeless, because its truth is timeless.
The butterfly has long since faded, but the moment it inspired lives on, suspended in silver halide and human emotion.
Emotional Proxy and Symbolic Self-Portrait
There are certain images that do not scream their meaning—they whisper it. Dana Stirling’s Butterfly, July 2020 is one such image, where silence, fragility, and symbolism converge into a self-portrait that reveals more through absence than presence. Though no person appears in the frame, the emotional content is unmistakably autobiographical. It’s a portrait not through likeness, but through essence.
Stirling’s creative language has always leaned toward the symbolic. Her body of work consistently returns to themes of memory, containment, emotional stasis, and psychological interiority. She rarely includes people, instead opting for carefully curated objects—dolls inside jars, small animals frozen in time, childhood toys slightly askew. These items become emotional stand-ins, representing her inner world more effectively than literal depictions ever could.
This butterfly, held gently in the curve of her hand, takes on the role of surrogate—one of the most delicate and eloquent figures in her archive.
“I don’t photograph people,” Stirling has said. “Especially not myself. It’s not that I can’t—it’s that it doesn’t speak the way objects do. Objects carry stories without shouting them. This butterfly became a surrogate for me—for what I was feeling, fearing, and silently processing.”
There’s power in this act of substitution. By allowing a fragile, lifeless creature to carry the emotional weight of her experience, Stirling sidesteps the performative demands of a self-portrait and instead offers something more vulnerable: an unguarded fragment of truth, distilled into gesture and stillness.
Layered Symbolism in a Single Frame
The image is steeped in poetic ambiguity. The butterfly, by nature a symbol of transformation and ephemerality, embodies fragility and change. Yet here it is motionless, no longer in flight, preserved in stillness. It becomes a paradox—life-like, but dead; light, but emotionally weighted.
Dana’s hand, suspended mid-air and softly out of focus, isn’t merely a physical support. It becomes an instrument of reverence. It does not grasp or hold with force—it cradles. The gentle arc of her palm turns the scene from a documentation of a dead insect into an image pulsing with quiet compassion.
Meanwhile, the background is ethereal—blurred, indistinct, gently dissolving into abstraction. That foggy atmosphere mimics the disorientation of life during the pandemic, when days bled into each other, and the outside world was reduced to fragments glimpsed through windows. The soft focus reinforces the emotional clarity that exists only in the act of holding this single, small symbol.
The photograph doesn’t strive to be definitive. It resists conclusion. Like grief, it lingers unresolved. It invites viewers into its world, not to understand everything, but to feel something.
The Interior Landscape of Lockdown
To fully understand the emotional resonance of Butterfly, July 2020, one must consider its context—not only the setting of the image, but the psychological landscape in which it was created. The summer of 2020 was a period of uncertainty, loss, and suspended motion. For many, it was a time when emotional and physical spaces collapsed into one another.
Dana’s apartment—where the photo was taken—was not chosen for its aesthetics. It was simply where life was happening. The walls, the air, the furniture were saturated with the texture of anxiety and unresolved emotion. That space, layered with discomfort and longing, became an unwitting collaborator in the creation of the image.
The butterfly was kept for weeks before she felt ready to engage with it. During that time, it became more than an object. It became a metaphor—a fragile reflection of her own suspended state. When she finally photographed it, she wasn’t documenting a specimen. She was giving form to an inner truth she couldn’t otherwise express.
This convergence of psychological introspection, domestic environment, and artistic intention gives the image its haunting weight. It is not just a visual artifact—it is a vessel for emotional containment.
Choosing Symbol Over Subject
Stirling’s decision to use objects instead of human figures stems from a desire to express emotion indirectly. In this way, her work follows a lineage of artists who understand the evocative power of metaphor—how a simple object can be more revealing than an expressive face.
In choosing to work with inanimate symbols, Dana avoids the limits of identity and representation. The butterfly is not bound by gender, age, or personal narrative. It can belong to anyone. It becomes a shared symbol—one that viewers can project their own stories onto.
This accessibility is what gives her work its resonance. It doesn’t impose meaning—it suggests it. It allows viewers to enter the emotional world of the image on their own terms. The photograph becomes a collaborative experience between artist and audience, where both bring their interpretations, griefs, and reflections to the table.
The symbolism doesn’t simplify—it deepens. It layers the image with interpretive potential, ensuring its emotional relevance endures beyond the moment of creation.
A Monument to a Moment
Butterfly, July 2020 is not simply a visual record of a butterfly held in a hand. It is a monument to a very specific moment in time—a point where stillness became a survival tactic, and where noticing something small became an act of emotional resilience.
In this image, Stirling offers testimony to the unseen labor of enduring: the slow days filled with anxiety, the longing for meaning in monotony, and the unspoken grief that hovered like dust. She doesn’t narrate these emotions—she distills them into form.
What makes this photograph enduring is its ability to say so much with so little. There is no performance, no overt symbolism, no demand on the viewer. And yet, it echoes with the experiences of so many who lived through that summer, quietly carrying their losses and holding their breath.
The butterfly becomes more than an insect. It becomes a relic of the quiet chaos that defined that year.
Intimacy Without Exposure
In many ways, Stirling’s work embodies a unique kind of vulnerability—one that is intimate but not exposing. By embedding her personal story into objects, she allows herself emotional freedom without sacrificing privacy. The result is work that feels honest, but never invasive.
Butterfly, July 2020 embodies this perfectly. It is deeply intimate, yet it never declares its intention aloud. It speaks in texture, in gesture, in soft gradients of light. It does not rely on spectacle. Its strength lies in restraint.
This restraint allows the image to breathe. Viewers are not told what to feel. They are simply invited into a quiet space where feeling becomes possible.
In a cultural moment saturated with overexposure and visual noise, this kind of sincerity stands out. It’s a reminder that art can be powerful without being loud—that emotion can be profound even in whispers.
A Visual Testament to Stillness
Ultimately, Butterfly, July 2020 is a testament to stillness as a form of meaning. It reminds us that some of the most transformative moments are not dramatic—they are quiet. They are felt in the seconds where nothing happens, in the pauses between action.
Dana Stirling didn’t plan this image. She simply responded—to a moment, to a feeling, to a presence. That act of slowing down, of listening to instinct, allowed her to create something that transcends the specific and becomes universal.
The photograph now exists beyond its origin. It has become an icon of quiet endurance, a visual prayer offered in a time of chaos. It holds grief without dramatizing it. It holds memory without explaining it.
In doing so, it becomes more than a self-portrait. It becomes a shared language for anyone who has felt the weight of stillness and the ache of holding on.
Resonance in Absence
This photograph is a study in absence. There is no motion, no expression, no narrative in the traditional sense. Yet it is loaded with presence—the presence of emotion, of memory, of lived experience.
It is a visual metaphor for 2020: a world paused, people retreating into themselves, searching for meaning in overlooked corners. The butterfly is not just an insect; it is a vessel of collective grief and fragile hope. It is both artifact and elegy.
As viewers, we project our own experiences into that frame. We see our own stillness in the hand, our own uncertainty in the blur. The butterfly may have died, but in being noticed, preserved, and photographed, it became something more: a fragile stand-in for all that could not be said out loud.
Legacy of a Quiet Frame
What makes this photograph linger is its quiet honesty. There is no spectacle, no gimmick. Just a single frame that encapsulates the emotional complexity of a moment in history. It doesn’t scream for relevance—it earns it through truth.
Dana Stirling didn’t set out to make a grand statement. She made a small, instinctual choice: to stop the car, to notice, to care. And from that decision, a photograph was born—one that will outlast the moment it captured, one that continues to resonate in ways even she might not have predicted.
In a world often saturated with noise, images like Butterfly, July 2020 remind us of the strength of subtlety, of the stories waiting in quiet spaces, and of the emotions we carry in our hands without even realizing it.
Final Thoughts:
Dana Stirling’s Butterfly, July 2020 is not just a photograph—it is an intimate reflection frozen in time, a distilled moment that transcends aesthetics to touch something profoundly human. In its stillness lies its strength. The image asks for nothing, yet it gives us everything: a pause, a breath, a quiet reminder that even the smallest moments, when observed closely, carry immense emotional resonance.
What lingers most is not the technical skill, though it is present, nor the visual beauty of the butterfly, though that too is undeniable. It’s the emotional texture—the sensitivity and vulnerability embedded in each decision Dana made, from retrieving the butterfly to choosing when and how to photograph it. This was not a project built on spectacle or performance. It emerged from instinct, introspection, and quiet perseverance during a year defined by fear, fatigue, and waiting.
The image invites the viewer to look deeper, to consider the significance of overlooked things—a fallen insect, a hand barely moving, a background out of focus. It reminds us that not all stories need to be loud to be powerful. Sometimes, the quietest expressions are the most enduring. Butterfly becomes a vessel for grief, solitude, and the need to hold onto something—anything—that feels real in times of upheaval.
Through this single frame, Dana Stirling crafts a silent conversation about fragility—not only the fragility of life, but also of memory, of time, of our inner landscapes when they are disrupted. It is a deeply personal image that speaks to universal emotions. Whether one views the butterfly as a symbol of transformation, loss, or suspended beauty, the emotional weight of the photograph remains undeniable.
In the end, Butterfly, July 2020 is not just a picture of a butterfly. It is a self-portrait in silence, an archive of stillness, and a meditation on the tender act of noticing. It is proof that when art is made honestly, even a single, simple moment can leave an indelible mark—quiet, but unforgettable.
