Underlining Themes

There will be two underlining themes that will guide me during my process. A conceptual, as well as an aesthetic. I will explain them below, without getting too artsy fartsy.

The Conceptual

Taken from the book The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle:

“When someone goes to the doctor and says, "I hear a voice in my head," he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don't realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues.

You have probably come across "mad" people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that's not much different from what you and all other "normal" people do, except that you don't do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy.

Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.”

-Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now,  published by New World Library, 1997)

The Aesthetic

Photographs by Laura Emel Yilmaz

The aesthetic theme of the project will rely on the landscape and architecture of my homeland, Israel. Over the next week I will travel across the country photographing various areas that may serve as the settings, insipiration and visual guide for this endeavor.