She sits on a pouffe, freshly sutured wounds snaking on the spine of her naked back. She looks into a mirror blotched with errant drops of water. Broken masks lie scattered on the floor. Votive candles flicker as she stares into her own self, as if raking her own insecurities. Not to wail about them, but to vanquish them. Defeat them. Hers is a quest. To discover a confident, beautiful girl, fluid in all she does… Her real self is conspicuous; she pines for her ideal self.
I know not her name. She is anonymous. There is no name. Merely a caption that reads: Revelations. Accepting the Real Me. She is an intense photograph hanging on a stark wall in the Stupid Eye photo exhibition, the world’s first of its kind photo project that helps people realize their self through therapeutic imagery.
Conceived, structured and shot by ‘photographically minded psychologist’ Harsheen K Arora and a psychologically minded photographer Vipul Amar, Stupid Eye is based on the premise that with a better understanding of one’s true self one is better equipped to realize one’s actual potential.
I step into New Delhi’s Triveni Kala Sangam and photographs start narrating their stories. A young man in a business suit peers out of a window, hand in pocket, the chiaroscuro meandering through his What Next? angst. A svelte woman in a little black dress sits inside a red telephone booth yearning to free herself from the “shackles of right and wrong.”
A lanky fella who knows he is neither “worthless nor God” aspires to be a self-made man. He stands on a stilt, almost tearing the sky to attain the “balance”. That is the purpose of Stupid Eye: to meld art with psychological therapeutic techniques to custom-design an image for individuals which reveals their innermost core. Stupid Eye photographs dig beyond the skin of the individual, it reveals the soul.
That task of revelation is tedious, long-drawn, wearisome, soul-sapping. Perhaps that explains the beginning of Stupid Eye. It was born in a man’s anguish. In that poignant moment he decided to amble out of a known, plush world into an unknown tomorrow.
He left behind everything that he knew. He deleted all contact numbers from his phone. Burdened with his own questions and saddled with anguish, he had merely one promise to hinge tomorrows on – I will not lie to myself. The man: Vipul Amar. The consequence: Stupid Eye.
Joining hands was Arora, who holds a post-graduate degree in clinical psychology from University of Wales; her training includes Creative Art and Drama Therapy. Started in 2012, Stupid Eye began with Arora asking participants to talk of their real self and ideal self. For most, there lay a big chasm.
The ideal self was seeped in pain, phobias, norms, fear, inhibitions of individuals. With a nary a hope for self-actualization. In group as well as individual sessions, participants ranging from age 14 to 58 mustered courage to peel their own emotional and experiential layers to accost their own real self.
Herein, Arora and Amar picked up the key points of the lives for the culmination – a photo shoot that would freeze the pain, the experience, the fear, the phobias, the keywords of the participant into their framed photograph. For self-actualization.
So powerful has been its impact that Stupid Eye has been published by World Mental Health Congress 2013. This year it will also be presented at the 28th International Congress of Applied Psychology (Paris) and 7th World Congress of Psychotherapy in Durban, South Africa.
As Amar walks me through the exhibitions, real people emerge out of the photographs, as if to tell the world that Stupid Eye has enhanced the insight into their own self; that the chasm between real and ideal world has been spanned; that they can look into the mirror and know themselves.
I run through Stupid Eye. I feel a little more stupid. Not stupid as you think. Stupid as Carl Jung thinks – “Stupidity is the mother of the wise”. I return home. Wiser. Stupider. And a tad more in tandem with my self.
Preeti Verma Lal
(www.deepblueink.com)
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