Metamorphosis

METAMORPHOSIS

In past projects I've explored the transformative power of inner emotion. I’ve learned that if people are placed in a safe emotional space often a complex interior world will reveal itself. My idea was to use hypnosis to provide a group of subjects the opportunity to access a private, hidden state of mind, and to create photographic portraits of their transformations.

I worked with a trained hypnotherapist to try and create an environment conducive to emotional exploration. I interviewed dozens of people to find subjects who were open to probing some aspect of their inner life. Each one had to be willing to be naked and unprotected both emotionally and physically. I photographed people without clothes so as not to distract from the transformations they were enacting.

Before beginning a session, each subject was asked to describe a transformation that they would like to experience. Transformations ranged from wanting to access a memory, to inhabiting the body of another creature, to entering into another state of nature. One woman wanted to feel like she was surrounded by a crowd of people who were jostling her. Another subject wanted to re-experience telling his mother he was gay. Someone else wanted to float in the sea as he did as a child. What was striking to me is how little the actual physical transformations resembled the original idea, although it was clear that every subject was having a profoundly intense experience.

Each session began with the subject, fully clothed, lying down on a soft bed in my studio. The hypnotist sat in a chair by their side, slowly guiding them into a trance. This often took more than an hour, as he gently, rhythmically, and slowly led them deeper and deeper inside themselves. At the end of the long session, the hypnotist reminded them of the transformation they chose, before snapping his fingers and awakening them.

Fully awake, each subject was asked to remove their clothes, and stand in front of a black wall, in an area that had been pre-lighted with strobe lights. Since I used an 8 x 10 view camera to shoot the photographs, I was unable to see through the lens if the subjects moved out of the frame so I placed tape marks on the floor indicating the parameters of the shooting space. At that point, the hypnotist snapped his fingers again, and the subject went into a deep trance a second time, wandering around before the camera without any direction from me as they acted out a deeply personal internalized vision. 

These photographs were created in conjunction with my series, THE BOUND, which I see as the mirror image of the hypnosis portraits. THE BOUND explores mummification, often part of a sexual practice involving great trust between partners. The subjects, rendered powerless by their bonds, become completely dependent on the person who does the binding. This womb-like safety enables them to go deeply into a trance state called subspace, where the conscious mind relaxes and the subconscious becomes predominant. Unlike the subjects under hypnosis, who are naked in every sense of the word, the wrapped bodies are intentionally hidden and demobilized. The person within remains a mystery, with their experience implied rather than explicit.

Both series delve beneath the constructed facades we all present to the world. Each image becomes a record of someone who has been encouraged to examine his or her essential self, either by going deeply inward or, freed by hypnosis, accessing a hidden, subconscious world.