The Bedroom Conception

The bedroom signifies a private place at once transparent and secure like the sanctuary of the womb. The womb itself signifies a return to the beginning, pure creation and a newly developed idea or a relationship. Being in another’s bedroom can represent our sexual attraction to that person and simultaneously indicate that we need no longer fear them. By entering that private space, abstract ideas and enigma become material, fragile and human. Feelings of attraction, fear and mystery of the unknown diminish when we are allowed into an individual’s most personal space. The distance we felt before we entered the bedroom is bridged and the soft focus of fantasy stripped back to the reality of the universal and the mundane; bed linen, toilet paper, CD holders, milk crates, mirrors, paintings and rope. In its natural state, our most private space reveals everything of our private world and hidden personality. This body of work was done in 2009. I decided to photograph my subjects without giving them any instruction before or during the photo session. My goal was to venture into a pure unknown experience. Preplanning would have allowed less room for surprise, for the idea to find itself. Rather, uncertainty allowed ambivalence to seep in, so much more vital and revealing than certainty and clarity.Once you feel yourself observed by the lens, everything changes. You constitute yourself in the process of “posing” you instantaneously make of yourself another body. To eliminate that alienation I chose to wear a blindfold and remove myself from the traditional role of photographer behind the camera and step in. I was hoping to suspend my subjects identities, to give them the feeling they were not being photographed to maintain a kind of distance by not looking through the camera and being visually isolated from them. When we close our eyes we give entire control of our senses to our mind, our hearing becomes our sight, helping us picture the world surrounding us, peacefully contemplating the significance of each moment. More than ever I became a seeker of personal truth, and more than ever, confused by what that truth might be and by what means it might be gained. Alienated from the world by a mask, I allowed my subjects more freedom to move and thereby participate in the image-making process. In the grace and intimacy with which they interact with me it was as participant, not photographer, an attitude that is doubled by the relationship to the camera that was fixed and triggered by remote control during the photo session. This work can also be seen as a study of the subjects and their relationship with themselves and the stranger in their bedroom. Both a mystery and attraction associated with voyeuristic allure.The spectator is invited to project themselves intellectually into these the most intimate spaces of my subject’s homes and in turn asked to confront difficult voyeuristic questions. The spectator is left with a sense of disorientation and mystery, images creating questions rather than answers