Persephone's first Blue Blood appearance was a series with her and Casey Chaos lensed by Justice Howard for issue #7. Forrest first met Persephone in person at, I think it was, the Glamourcon where she won the Bettie Page contest. As she beat Dita Von Teese for the title, this meant that Forrest and I didn't work with Dita like we would have otherwise, but that is a whole nother anecdote.

Persephone was one of Forrest's and my most wonderful muses when we first started taking photography seriously, beyond just shooting what we wanted for Blue Blood magazine in print. We shot stuff of her which was erotica, fetish, fashion, rock and roll, and uncategorizable. We shot more magazine covers of her than of anyone else. We shot more magazine covers of her than everyone else she has ever shot with put together. Although it is nice that "altmodeling" is a more viable career option these days, at least as a second job, there will be very few Persephones in the future.

At the time, Forrest Black and I were photographing her, everything was on film and it was expensive as hell to shoot and a long process to go from film to negative to photograph to magazine. Nobody thought altmodel was a career, so anyone posing for vampirically sexy photos was doing it just because they really meant it. Forrest, Persephone, and I all did it for the glory in those days and there was a purity to the art because we were creating it because we wanted to, because promoting that aesthetic was important to all of us, because it was simply cool. We didn't aim for marketing or any of that stuff beyond the joy of creating and sharing what we created.

FOX TV came out and did a segment on a shoot we did at Mistress Persephone's cool home horror dungeon. The crew was super nice at the time, but apparently the promos for the show later were "Has Goth Gone Too Far" or something along those lines. Fortunately I didn't have television at the time, so I missed actually seeing that. We did end up shooting Persephone for the cover of AVN's Fetish Magazine because editrix Ellen Thompson had seen the show and recognized us from TV when we attended CES.

There are a number of girls strutting their stuff on camera today because they saw that TV show and the work that Forrest and I created with Persephone in venues including GothicSluts.com, Fetish, Playboy, MK Ultra, Tattoo Savage, Women in Power, Dirty, Draculina, Gothic Beauty, AVN Online, Marquis, and many more. One of those lovelies recently asked me how we could have done all that and I found myself saying that girls modeling today owe Persephone a creative debt because she helped pave the way. She was really cool and, despite the sacrifices entailed, we all had a lot of fun creating these images.

--Amelia G, Los Angeles, December 2005