Research - Gregory Barker

I stumbled across Barker's work while looking at the photography blogs I have bookmarked and his project caught my eye. It's a truly fascinating one and i'm not sure anyone has done anything like it before.

The project 'Me, you and him: portraits under hypnosis' is exactly what it implies. Using three subjects who know each other very well in real life, he had them hypnotised and then photographed them. This is the little bit of text that accompanies the images on his website and helps explain it more...

The thing I find really interesting about this project is the way that during portraits some people find it very awkward to relax and act naturally but the whole point of hypnosis is the relaxation and the release. You'd expect people to more easy around the camera and perhaps show the lens more of themselves (in the metaphorical sense).

It is this identity and personality aspect of the project that interests me as obviously I am not doing portraits or even using photographs of people in general. Particularly as he asked the subjects to impersonate one another. I don't imagine you would have them depicting them quite as openly without the relaxation of hypnosis.