Did you ever wake up with a sense that you were leaving a magical place as you enter another ordinary day? The dream itself vanishes, but for the rest of your day you experience fleeting flashbacks to that tantalizingly near yet elusive place. A doctor might attribute it to a digestive disturbance, but for poets such dreams have a psychic reality that can be explored with a bit of effort. For photographer Josephine Sacabo, the visions conjured by her favorite writers inspire photographs that resemble fragments of a fantastical parallel universe.
In the appropriately titled Waking Dream, a mannequin like a silent movie starlet in an evening dress appears surrounded by stuffed trophy animals including a tiger in a tux, and while fantastical, it clearly has "real world" parallels. In The Dress, left, a more subtle view of a girl in a lacy dress is seen from the rear as water gurgles in a nearby stone fountain. Although nothing much is happening here, this is one of those visions that could pull you through the looking glass, a sensibility rendered more explicitly in Behind the Mirror, bottom, or I am a Star, above left. But in I am a Memory of Myself, top, the lens of an old camera is the portal into a world "beyond thought" where images reflect what Sacabo calls "our true psychic reality"--the magic mirror that can enable "a deeper connection between ourselves and the world." ~D. Eric Bookhardt
Beyond Thought: Homage to Clarice Lispector: Photogravures by Josephine Sacabo, through Dec. 31, A Gallery For Fine Photography, 241 Chartres St., 568-1313. Left: Behind the Mirror.