"Dream Portal" is a series of photographic portraits, captured using medium and large format film cameras and printed onto silver gelatin fiber paper in the wet darkroom. The portraits are all single exposures, with prisms inserted between the subjects and the camera lens.
I once had a music composition teacher who, in response to one of my more pedantic efforts, suggested that I try to "dream more." That advice inspired this project. Our waking life has certain visual rules that can be broken in our dreaming life, where we encounter fleeting, distorted imagery. That imagery is what I seek to evoke in this series, using the prism as a portal that allows me to visually explore the threshold of the realistic waking world.
When we dream, we cede control to our subconscious. Similarly, the process of capturing these images involved ceding control to the vagaries of light; even the tiniest rotation of a prism can completely change an image. The images captured on a large format camera were of course captured blind, and even the images captured on a medium format camera often looked very little like what they looked like through the viewfinder. Chaotic though they may be, however, dreams are seeded by our memories, and so I've selected for this series images where the prism not only breaks light apart but also reorganizes it coherently, the way our dreaming mind reorganizes the random signals coming from our brainstem.