THE SECRET ART

OF

PHOTOMORPHOSIS

"The human body is, above all, a constellation of points of fire

from which crystals radiate." Jacques Herold

There is always the Wedding Night that prefigures the golden hour, the
central inclusion running like a myth through the interior landscape, where
the real and the imaginary come to feed at the same table, bathe in the same
water and embrace under the same light. This interior model, at the heart of
photomorphosis, provides the most desirable place, the Red Table, upon
which all things are conjured...

The interior model, as the Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer says: "is shaped
by both conscious and unconscious elements. The impulse coming from the
world around (from reality) is treated in the unconscious boiler of an internal
laboratory to which I have no access. Inspiration is, then, the doorbell to the
door of a house which tells me that the internal model is ready and I can
come up and collect it. During the course of this process the pre-product
emerges into the conscious several times for a moment to form further
reality impulses so that it may once more submerge itself below the surface
back to the unconscious where it carries on its work. I cannot control the
rhythm of this process until the moment when that little bell rings."

He continues, by saying: "In my work, like the old alchemists, I am

continually distilling the water of my experiences - from childhood, my
obsessions, idiosyncrasies, anxieties - in order that, with this process, the
heavy water of knowledge essential for the transmutation of life, begins to
flow."
In 1973, I discovered the process of photomorphosis, and simultaneously
invented the terms: "photomorph", "morph" and "morphing" to best describe
the activity and results of this process, which became both the portal through
which I entered into a dialogue with the interior model and the exit through
which revelations entered the light of day. The "Wedding Night" is the
primary solution, the morphological space within which all male and female
elements communicate, mingle and synthesize in a dark field of stars.

The "Red Table" is where the process works its magic by speeding up the
landscape and the beings that have come, like the sun when it moves a little
closer to the earth, to linger a while longer into the evening. Here the
movement is both frenzied and haunted, like caressing a phantom lover who
never stops dancing. This is that "certain point in the mind where..." as
Andr Breton said, "life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and
present, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low,
cease to be perceived as contradiction."

The arrival of the Wedding Guests signals the movement of the Secret Art,
and the precise moment when the lovers hands are dipped into the darkest,
deepest solution of the luminous body of the Photomorphose. It is the
moment of the eclipse and the utter stillness that verges on hysteria The
moment when the body is the veil perceived in the mind; where the body of
perception, unlike the human body, except on rare occasions, is mostly a
transparent vessel with a deafening hum, a disorienting glow and an endless
gaze that changes its shape in an instant its flesh is consciously chosen
for one reason and unconsciously selected for quite another. The Secret Art
is the shadow of the golden hour.

On the Red Table in the center of the Wedding Night, the sun is a reflection
of the wolf when it comes to lick your face
 A Precise Poetic Introduction

The great black stone is pulled out of the belly of the shark, and the taking of pictures
begins. Like a wildly swinging rainbow coaxed out of night's fearful prism with a
delicious eye, this camera obscura, this catcher of internally generated flashes of light,
tears its tripod out by the roots and begins its delirious reconnaissance of the unknown.
The camera enters the dream and is torn to shreds. But that was yesterday... Now the
crystals are coming together, now the insects are reconstructing the light, now beasts are
scratching at the vortices, and now the wind seals the whole thing with its blood. The
witches have smeared their 'flying ointment' over it, sorcerers divine by it and madmen
look into its future... The camera obscura is a man and woman lying down to make love.

DEFINITION

Photomorphosis is the enchanted process by which an organism changes, or

experiences metamorphosis under the influence of light... It is a natural
process in the realm of photosynthesis, photolysis, etc., indicating the
importance of light on living things. As an external organic process entering
another level of meaning, it became an internal manifestation of an evolving
morphology of the psyche.

Under the sway of obsessive desire, I combined the words photograph and
metamorphosis to signify the photomorphic process, without realizing that
such a word already existed. But, further research revealed that
photomorphosis was no longer used by the scientific community to denote
the organic process of light-induced metamorphosis, and had been replaced
by photomorphogenesis. Thus, by my investigation I have given a new
meaning to the abandoned word 'photomorphosis'... by surrealizing it. To
paraphrase Breton: photomorphosis has been given to me to make surrealist
use of it.

The sustained investigation of the imagination, raised to the level of

delirious curiosity, by introduction of the activity of looking inward to
discover, or in effect, to shed light on, to illuminate, becomes a perfect
analogy of the photomorphic process... The depths of the imagination open,
the fields widen, things become visible... and metamorphosis is inevitable.
 Dreams are the Guardians of Sleep...

With Max Ernst, the art of collage became a weapon of desire. In his work
there is the awareness of the interpenetrating resonances and frequencies of
things, of diverse actualities aroused by the dissolving limitations of reality
as it appears. He rightly proposes "the alchemy of the visual image." With
the Photomorph this weapon reached for a more radical blending of the real
and the imaginary. In a frenzy of desirable attractions and unreasonable
possibilities, things, beings and objects relinquish their familiar
appearances... they have all already begun the process of transformation,
long before they are recognized and chosen. No longer a matter of simple
juxtaposition, displacement or disruption, the photomorph is a pure and
unrelenting fusion of many realities, where the field of experience disrobes
and unravels the thread of appearances... At the intersecting points of a
strange design, a dream design, a design pulled out of the dream by it's
threads.

A little before midnight, in a darkened office building, on August 17, 1973,

while surreptitiously making a copy of a magazine illustration on a copier, I
accidentally moved the illustration and discovered the hidden life of things
just beneath the surface. Totally drawn into and fascinated by this sudden
encounter, I began to explore this new way of seeing things. Tearing pages
out of magazines, almost at random, I began "playing" with them on the
copier, while it recorded my activity. I would combine illustrations, crumble
them up and crush them, all the while moving them at various speeds. I was
engaged in some new and strange form of magic, or physical nonverbal
incantation, gesturing with these illustrations, even setting fire to them...

Movement became a means of delirious navigation, an almost

somnambulant involvement with what cannot be seen and a pursuit
analogous to searching for water with a divining-rod. Searching for the
underground currents, the "heavy water", the golden serum. Taking hold of
those things and moving them, as they've never been moved before...
allowing them to move magnetically on their own, as if in a trance and
drawn by sirens. While the flashes of light from the copier capture strange
patterns, new conditions and striking transformations reveal themselves. The
ordinary was changed into something extraordinary. The unknown became
visible. I felt an almost symbiotic relationship with the machine, in that it
became a device for recording my unconscious desires, glimpses of other
worlds and other ways of being... This "machine" had become the
alchemist's furnace, the Athanor, where all the elements are perfected. A
door had been opened, the machine made for relatively easy access to what
was elsewhere.

Landscapes and architectural forms, anthropological studies and astronomy

all merged into one perception; scientific discoveries and diagrams,
archaeological burial grounds, the haphazard chiaroscuro of drapery and
gowns, the naked female form in all its splendor, became solutions that
mixed so easily in the vessel of photomorphic reconnaissance. I seduced
them, played with them and then destroyed them, only to bring their new
shadows and reflections, their new desires and revelations back to life again,
seeing them for the very first time.

With photomorphosis I discovered the prime material, a rich treasure of

desirable possibilities... I had unleashed my own unique source material.
Collage became a hungry receptacle, a kind of waking dream, yet filled to
overflowing with all that was not known, never seen before and shimmering
with otherworldly presence. My perception of reality had been radically
changed and I became an explorer in a new land. Light and dark, movement
and non-movement, interior and exterior all combined in an inevitable and
highly charged space of magnetic attractions.
 Collage is not collage, but the menace of wolves

Women became star-clusters that dawned in the spinning wheel of blood-

filled doorways, and flowered in the compass of ancient civilizations, more
wolves than streams, more flame than memory... Each human presence
spread out in plant flowering, dripped with mineral inclusions and stalked
the night with light-filled eyes... They howled, whispered, whined, cooed
and splashed. They regrew their tails, and licked themselves; threw light off
the facets of their prisms and eclipsed. They brooded over golden eggs... the
psychosomatic eggs of an open window... transparent eggs...

The movement of the wolf stalking its prey, becomes the instinctual dance
unleashing the phases of the moon. The frenzied gathering for the Wedding
Portrait forms the water of dreams into the shapes of desire. Imaginary
solutions to actual events bring stars to the marrow and place the vanishing
point in the middle of a thought, between the shadow and its weapon,
between the serpent and its specter. Here, every whisper gives off sparks,
every kiss blackens the sun and moves by veins through the conscious glass
of more than just here and always more than there.

The Obsessive Image...

 Madness to the Method

Movement is the key to the process... Movement, both wildly delirious and
calmly sensuous, exploratory and guided by lunatic lights, slips of the mind
and sudden lapses in orientation. Cryptic and magical movements following
their own prey, in their own space and time... By moving things on the glass
of the copier, while the machine illuminates and captures this movement,
this almost prurient gesticulation, I enter into a phase of temporary
communication with the things that I move and their desire to become
something else. The unknown is moved into the light of day, into perception
and recognition. The movement of things translates into a hunt for that
"space" where the essence of things becomes visible.

The city of Prague is pushed up against a wedding dress, while

simultaneously crushed by sunlight on water and then moved in a manner
most suggestive of caressing a naked body... while constellations enter into
the dance, passing through, moving very fast and then plunged into an
exposed burial ground, bones glowing with memory and sudden exaltations.
The whole is molded as with an invisible clay that becomes soluble at dusk
and shaped in desire till it flares up. This "movement" guided by hysteria on
the surface of water, is the phantom beast, the white wolf of childhood and
the great horned owl of sulphur dipped in mercury. Divination unravels the
structure of things moving too fast to be seen. Water, water burning bright...

A Pathology of Movement

The primary properties of movement are: Unseen, Unexpected, Violent,

Obscene, Seductive, Enchanted and Impending. Their individual velocities
revolve around a systematic engendering of hallucination, as a means to
attract the darkness into the light. These properties assume their shapes
according to the manner in which they pass through passionate hybrid
fascination. To further heighten the transparency they seek, each is in
possession of the interchangeable male/female qualities and attitudes of
human, animal, bird, insect, plant and mineral... and often, stars can be
glimpsed deep in shifting veils of sensory reflections; in pools of black fur,
the light from inside out. Earth, air, Fire and Water form the portal of
transparency. With regards to this conjuration, everything hangs in the
balance.
 The Movements

Unseen: Aleatory movement by which luminous bodies meeting for the first
time leave their shadows behind like the sparks of a secret language.

Unexpected: A sudden, unsettling movement of flickering eyelids that flood

out over the landscape with clairvoyant threads.

Violent: Projective movement which counterbalances the wolf with its prey
in the glow of bathing lunatics.

Obscene: An elegant movement in which the apparition of a starlit night

breathes out crystals that merge with the earth in gowns of fire.

Seductive: Transparent movement out of which the light that strikes the eyes
of beasts enters into the body of water when it dreams.

Enchanted: A dissolving movement that burns in the doorway of lovers

more dangerous even than murderers.

Impending: A revelatory movement between singing and sleeping that

generates a pure breath out of the bones of children.

Hallucination of Movement

The convulsive phases of movement engage both the light and the dark in a
joyous exhalation of the mind through the body... The fire burns in the
water, while the night begins to glow with each passing moment. He is the
darkened sun in a lunar gown, and She, the ruby of witch's milk in the prism
of dawn... They multiply in a bloody fountain, while their shadow plays
"dream" with the moon's golden salamander. They are the beings of lighted
water, the luminous vessels... inhaling the body through the mind.

A reflection going backwards, turns around, each movement passing into the
next. The animals pass through our shadows, clawing out stars. When the
female spreads her legs, she is a dark pool disturbed by desire she devours
her lover with light, teeth touching, almost breaking. The Photomorphose
enters in through the window.
The soft clicking sounds (behind), the deafening movement of images on
water, and the distant howling (ahead), the heavy breathing (outside), of
knowledge, hunger and transparency There is an animal substance in the
gaze, a glowing presence that yields the veil of appearances reveals us
through our absence. The ape is a doorway through which one passes in a
rush of sparks.

Malcolm de Chazal says, in The Revelation of Night, that: "The shadow

moves and does not move, since the shadow is the body of night, and the
night cannot move. Thus the shadow which moves and does not move puts
the night everywhere, even in broad daylight." The visual analogy of an
animating spirit that informs the Secret Art of Photomorphosis, revolves
round this "movement of things which do not move" and provides an
entrance into the photomorphic process, placing that entrance "everywhere,
even in broad daylight."

There are those aspects of being that move faster than the speed of light and
thus cannot be seen. To enable capture, I must move just as fast. Then, at the
right moment, when the object comes into view and moves close, one must
be very cautious and move so slow that movement becomes the silent urging
of desire... One must, at that moment, stop looking, because to look is to turn
into stone and lose the essence.

Moving up against, folding into, crumpling and tearing up, setting on fire...
the friction of rubbing ignites and draws into, enfolds into itself all that
comes close, as if to feed. All is destroyed and the remains are fire-washed
in blood's moonlight... the motion is captured in the photomorphic map; the
map of perceptual cross-pollination. What can be seen is not there and what
is invisible moves in another direction... The wind swirls above the
compass-points...
 Strange Encounter...

The everyday miasma of ordinary reality, the prime material, became a

source of marvelous unraveling, fantastic unfoldings... new growth in the
underbrush of possibilities. I wanted to include everything and began the
transformation of bones, pieces of charred metal from a foundry furnace, and
stones (all placed and moved as adeptly as possible so as not to break the
glass! Ah, but therein lies the dialectic: with certain things, how I wanted to
break the glass, how often I imagined breaking the glass!), feathers, water
and even the clothing of a loved one... and then, later, in a moment of
abandon, I set fire to things. I wanted to capture my desires, so I closed my
eyes and formed them in the air.
 Imaginary solutions to actual events

When the machine is turned on and the humming begins, the veils of night
part and spin out of control. A supernatural breath communicates with the
tiny granules of ink-black toner and weds them to the clairvoyance of
elemental particles from here to there and back again, deeper in the mind
than stars. The image has vanished, replaced by the disquieting sense of the
image... a tangible substance to be shaped. This is the phantom space (as a
perception of reality many times removed, and seen from a distance) that
one grapples with, attempts to seduce with nearly obscene gestures,
whispered possibilities of delight, and endless temptations. One must be
relentless, like a lover in a mirror whose sexual reflection follows you
everywhere, like a shadow in the blade of a sword. Then, ever so slowly, the
eyes begin to open... eyes that have not been opened in a thousand years.

The Red Table

 THE RED TABLE

Quite without knowing it, I discovered the Red Table, and it set up a
shadowy field of understanding, a reference point from which all things
radiate outwards. I was strongly attracted to the idea of images gathered
together in a field, where the well-known idea of the "fortuitous encounter"
of Lautramont played a part, but more importantly a place where great
magic was conjured. The Red Table was the rupture into consciousness of
an object that became a central locus, a magnetic field, a landing-site... an
entire space wherein here and there, vast and minute, real and imaginary
came to play and cast the most irresistible shadows and reflections.

The memory of a childhood activity made manifest a desirable

reconciliation... My sister and I would steal small boxes from our Great
Aunt's bedroom, which contained, to our delighted eyes, a myriad of objects
like jewelry, keys, watches, glass eyes, marbles, lighters, teeth and trinkets
of every kind imaginable, and we would spread out these glittering objects
underneath the dining room table, whose cloth came down almost to the
floor, letting in just enough light to illuminate our treasure with an eerie,
almost otherworldly glow.

Many years later I discovered that the ordinary copy machine was a great
facilitator for opening the door to this lost world of childhood and bringing it
out into the daylight of the present, into the real world, by placing it on top
of the table (the glass of the copy machine)... where I flooded the darkness
with light. I was a child again playing with magical things. The table being
an analogy for the alchemist's work table where the prime materials are
transformed; the magician's or shaman's table or ground where the objects of
power are assembled... The flashes of light from the copier, in unison with
the mind's sparks of disruption and recognition, capture the sudden stirring
of phantom forms. Attracted to being watched, they respond by returning the
gaze, and are thus provoked into further change...

Seeing into the depths was as important as being seen, being looked at,
watched and observed...

My work is merely a reflection of the interior process of transformation, and

at the same time, it is a vehicle that aids in that process. It is a dual activity
going on simultaneously: the exterior gesture of photomorphosis, the
collage, and the unceasing interior activity of the psyche. Those are the
communicating vessels, their essences pouring back and forth between each
other, always changing, influencing and revealing.

Everything becomes anything else, as I rescue the ordinary from its confines,
and watch as desirable attractions are formed... New desires of the hive
summon earthquakes for honey, breathing guides forest fires through the
mythologies of the Glass-Breakers. What is the secret then, as I enchant only
those things which catch my eye and place them where they've never been
before? Or am I merely taking photographs in the dark?

ANCIENT SOLUTIONS OF PLEASURE ARE TURNING BLACK

During the Wedding Night, the owl burst out of the King, shedding light on
the surrounding landscape. The Queen takes in the shadow and gives birth to
reflections from the future. The androgynous Child plays with its magical
thorns, grooming itself with the threads of a dream... a being lighted from
within, it illuminates the Magician with the shapes of it's language. Time is
the ruby when it ignites, the emerald when it vanishes...

The great crystal resonates in its unceasing self-germination, while the vast
gears of night slowly grind down to a halt and the beings of lighted water
move forward to whisper: "The Wedding Guests have arrived... they are
coming to touch you."

*
On the Red Table can be seen the place far below the surface of our
particular perception of reality, where all things imagined come to groom
each other... like virginal stem cells before they metamorphose in the glow
of recognition and become the reflections above, that we've come to know
and love, and watch die...

The sorceress comes to me and tears out my eyes, and she whispers to me:
"Now you can see that light shimmering in the vessels..."
 The light vampires...

The Shaded World

AND THE FUTURE POSSIBILITIES OF REALITY AND

DREAM FORMING AN ALLIANCE AS A PHANTOM BEAST IN THE
RAPIDLY MATERIALIZING THEATRE OF THE HOLOGRAPHIC
PARADIGM

It remains necessary, at all costs, to extend the field of vision; which points
to Pierre Petiot's paraphrasing of Breton's statement concerning Matta: "The
need to call upon the support of the most modern resources, (even those of
science), simply expresses the aspiration to extend the field of vision." The
Image in the field of subatomic particles; the Object in the realm of quantum
physics; The Great Transparent Ones from the standpoint of Morphic
Resonance and the holographic paradigm, etc. But the ultimate goal is to
drive the imagination far beyond the concerns of mere science and
speculation; beyond the trivial pursuits of "Art" and make it real.
Marcel Duchamp called Matta: "the most profound painter of his
generation," saying further, that "His first contribution to surrealist painting,
and the most important, was the discovery of regions of space until then
unknown in the field of art." What is called for is the discovery of regions of
space unknown in the field of being; to extend the dream, to step outside of
the dream... Matta says: "The power to create hallucinations, is the power to
exalt life."

The distance between everyday perception of reality, and the unfettered

imagination, is the distance between the lost limb and the hand that scratches
it; between the child sleepwalking in the garden and the place he actually
sees himself in. It is this "distance" that becomes the movement of things
(and beings) that begin to fade and emit light as rain on earthly space. They
pass through each other...

There is only the singular importance of a lucid frenzy, aimed in its

suddenness to rearrange, to synthesize and clarify; to extract the golden
slurry and render transparent.

Marilyn Ferguson speaks of a certain kind of movement, when she proposes

a mathematical construct of reality by interpretation of frequencies from
another dimension...

*
As Allan T. Williams explains: "The four known fundamental forces in our
material universe that affect all tangible and intangible forms of matter are
electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and
gravitation.

The Holographic Paradigm postulates that a fifth fundamental force is the

preexisting nonmaterial physical energy of consciousness itself...

Just as visible light is embedded within and represents only a limited portion
of the full electromagnetic spectrum, so is relative human consciousness
embedded within and represents only a limited portion of the full continuum
of phenomenal consciousness."

David Bohm says that: The tangible world of our everyday lives is an
illusion, like a holographic image. Beneath that is a deeper order of
existence, a more primary level of reality that gives birth to all objects and
appearances of our physical world.

Democritus, as Alexander Roob suggests, in The Hermetic Museum: "traced

all phenomena capable of being experienced by the senses, including colors,
back to movements and changing combinations of minute particles without
quality, which he called atoms... (an) atomic reality behind the illusory
world of appearances..."

"In the field of art," writes Andr Breton, "a work can be considered
surrealist only in proportion to the efforts the artist has made to encompass
the whole psychophysical field (in which the field of consciousness
constitutes only a very small segment). Freud has demonstrated that at those
unfathomable depths there reigns the absence of contradiction, the relaxation
of emotional tensions due to repression, a lack of the sense of time, and the
replacement of external reality by a psychic reality obeying the pleasure
principle alone."
 Diabolical Molestations...

Delirium of the Fire-Games...

 Let us Prey...

A Key To the Field

Sometime during the early summer of 1971, the exact day I cannot recall,
while on a train from Florence to Zurich, I was looking out across the Lake
of Lucerne... the sun, just above the mountaintop in the distance, cast it's
sparkling on the surface of the lake. Suddenly, for only a few brief moments,
time itself seemed almost to slow down to a stop, I found myself not only
looking intently at this landscape, but, at the same moment, looking inward
at it as well. My field of perception had infinitely expanded to such an extent
that exterior vision and interior vision had merged and become
simultaneously apprehended on a single plane.

I was "looking" in two directions at once, at the same landscape... the

profound difference being that the other direction, the one behind me, or
inside, was vastly larger and much brighter, more infinite in relation to the
exterior view and just as real. Yet, even though I can only describe this
experience as if having another pair of eyes opened behind the eyes on my
face, looking inward, it was indeed a single, all-inclusive vision... In other
words, there did not seem to be a distinction between the two, no boundary
or division between interior and exterior; it was all one.

I was struck by the realness of it and it's absolute clarity. Also, I should
indicate that this experience was naturally occurring and not attributable to
the influence of any drug... nor was I dozing, or asleep and dreaming. It was
such a profound experience that everything else, since then, seemed to be
utterly lacking... and I have never been able to duplicate it naturally. But it
did appear to have opened a door somewhere... because very soon after I
discovered the secret art of photomorphosis.

"The red sun rises over a city and landscape. Aurora, or dawn, indicates the
moment when light and dark are not yet separated into two distinct entities,"
as Salomon Trismosin writes in the original 16th Century alchemical text
Splendor Solis; and as Adam McLean writes in his commentary on a 21st
Century translation of the same text: "The forces above have been incarnated
in earthly substance, but have, in a sense, died through this process... the
interface, the border between conscious and unconscious, has dissolved. The
conscious, radiant part of the soul has entered into the unconscious realm,
which itself, now like a dark sun, makes its forces felt in the conscious
sphere."

The Shaded World II

MYSTERIES OF ALCHEMY, SURREALISM AND "THE

VISIONS" IMPLICIT IN THE PHOTOMORPHIC METHOD, STEM
CELLS AND STARS IN THE MARROW

The physical activity of Photomorphosis, both projected inward and

reflected outward, is neither conceptual nor symbolic, but analogous to
actual events and conditions, concrete and unsettling. A full
participation of the fundamental forces of the natural world in
conjunction with the personal spectrum that is the psyche, combine in a
whirlwind of demonic dance... "It is all outside, but at a very deep
level..."

While the locus of photomorphosis is pure automatism, its meridian is

eroticism, and the measure of seeing is as much hallucination, as
intoxicated imagination which, by its very nature is, in darkness
solarized, seduced into disbelief, stripped naked and cannibalized,
licked, suckled and mixed passionately into a magical substance, a
marvelous solution to be smeared all over the body as if in a dream with
eyes wide open. The glow of lunacy as a means of navigation... The
exquisite passivity of the vampire's prey...

It is this which gives impetus to our splendid revolt against every formality,
that impels us perhaps deeper than we've ever imagined into this alien
world we once sought to escape, and restores to us that imperative, that
intoxication of refusing to participate in the games of a dying world.

The disruption and displacement, the bursting apart, the tearing

asunder and the destruction alluded to, or inherent in the
transformation of the prime material, are all more correctly described
as a rendering transparent and soluble, acting in accordance with
magnetic attraction and a joining together as in a potion... The more
visible manifestation being that of an alchemical wedding, a fusing
together, as in the act of copulation when, at the moment of orgasm,
there is only a pure release of pleasure...

Artifice more real than reality even

It became my intention to move as far away from "art" as possible; to excuse

myself from all the mundane and boring reasons for making art and, as with
science, "to drive the imagination far beyond the concerns of mere science
and speculation", and make it real... (But then, today, one might be more
prone to ask: "What is real?" and then, not be able to answer without
betraying themselves. As Joseph Beuys said, in one of his better moments:
"The mind is part of the exterior world, too, except it isn't visible. The mind
is the one element that includes the universe.") A parallel can be seen in
Alchemy, when it evolved from its classical state into its symbolic realm: it
became less of a search for physical gold and instead, more of an inward
quest and an intense liberation (a metamorphosis) of the spirit. The visual
imagery of alchemy (and surrealism) suggested a destruction of "things as
they are" and a replacement with "things as they could be"... or, perhaps, it
might be more correct to say: "things as they really are, when we are not
looking at them."
It is not a question of expression at all, but a means of knowledge and
discovery. Likewise, the intensity of my identification with photomorphosis,
as a state of being, as an object or means of exploration, was such that it
became an extension of my personality... with or without the use of the copy
machine.

I have never dreamed about anything in my work, nor have I ever imagined
anything like it... it is not planned in any way, but rather forms itself out of
the darkness. You will not find in my work what I have dreamed, or thought,
or desired, whom I've loved or how I've struggled to attempt real life... only
my navigations through the unknown, through the latent and implicate
essence of germinating realities.

My work is a reflection of the interior process of evolution, or

transformation. At the same time, it is a vehicle that aids in that process,
reflecting on it and bringing it to light, it becomes tangible. It is all a matter
of perception, and the attempt to alter, or change that perception... The work
is a visual record of those attempts.

New Desires of the Hive...

 "The Shadows, The Shadows..."
Approaching the imagination fully armed

The art of photomorphosis began in a spirit of revolt against the

ordinary everyday conditions of life as it is given to us, and in that sense,
it is a subversive activity. The exploration of the imagination and the
unknown is not only a source of revelation, both interior and exterior,
but also a purely revolutionary unfolding born out of that source...
Because it seeks to undermine the dualism inherent in a non-magical
construct based on logical modes of perception.
Movement was the means by which I subverted the ordinary copy
machine and turned it into a weapon, against the very society that
created the copy machine, against the mundane and the ordinary, and
used to capture the marvelous.

As Herbert Marcuse has written: "The work of art cannot be

comprehended in terms of social theory, neither can it be comprehended
in terms of philosophy. Art has its own language and illuminates reality
only through this language. (It) communicates truths not communicable
in any other language: it contradicts... What appears in art as remote
from the praxis of change demands recognition as a necessary element
in a future praxis of liberation... Art cannot change the world, but it can
contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and
women who could change the world."

FIRE AND WATER AS A WAY OF LIFE

Each "picture" is an image group, a mysterious gathering, a coven... a

mythology of images. Each image is a shadow, a source of light, a vessel, a
solution, and a synthesis... a wedding couple. Image-beings... Beings
brought together by accident, by desire, by magic... to enact what seem like
the ceremonies, rituals, couplings and delirious games of their sudden
encounters. Shape-shifters, they heal the pathological nature of their
perceptions of reality, by changing their shapes, their surroundings... each
one lighted from within, they light up the area around them by the heat of
their thoughts; they not only change their sex by changing their minds, they
change their surroundings by blinking their eyes; alter their words by giving
them flesh... In the blink of an eye, everything changes.
 The Wedding Guests Have Arrived

All that matters now, irregardless of any misgivings, is that mysterious

unification of signs that gravitate around us, that draw us forward through
our own maze of existence, that isolate us, in space and time, if only for a
few brief moments, that purify us... that preserve us for so long, that make a
revelation out of the "we" that are so tenuous, so fragile...

One afternoon in 1979, Philip Lamantia, the great surrealist poet, asked me
if I would provide a photomorph for the cover of his book of poems:
Becoming Visible. I went to work immediately and, simply by turning on
the machine, the very air about me seemed to come alive with whispering. In
a frenzy of anticipation I tore out illustrations from National Geographic
magazines, and fashionably dressed women from Vogue and Bazaar. When
the machine signaled its readiness I began, as I have always begun since the
beginning, spinning into enchantment the invisible forces, the waves and
elements, the visible needs and desires of base materials, cupping between
my warm, almost burning hands the rapidly accelerating miasma, inhaling
and exhaling...

I recall the birth of this one very simple image more than any other, because
of the haunted atmosphere surrounding it, the magical correspondences that
were at work and the hallucination of the "arrival" of those hybrid
messengers called The Owl People. They were the harbingers of revelation.
Those who brought things into being, who directed, as it were, the shaping
of desire.

Later, when cutting out (separating) and setting (integrating) the most
important parts onto the ground, the dazzling bits of treasure I extracted
(chose) and arranged on, what is not, or erroneously thought of as the
foreground, but on the magician's table, the Red Table, where these things
seek their own pleasure of being and form themselves.

But then silence, after such an auspicious beginning; everything stopped, as

if waiting... The ground had been laid, and I knew it wasn't finished. What
was needed, I could only imagine. I was uneasy for several days, agitated
and distracted. Every time I looked at the image, the words: "Come closer,
come closer, " came into my mind. Finally, after three days, when I resolved
to force myself into a state of calm, and what I can only describe as a distant
sensation of visual listening or an awareness of impending arrival, and to
make myself immaculately available, did something happen...

I was sitting in the living room looking through a recently acquired book
about owls, those supremely supernatural creatures... when suddenly the air
once again came alive with the sound of whispering, and sunlight came in
through the windows like honey, flooding over everything. I was
overwhelmed by the sense of presence in the room. I seemed to be seeing
tall, robed figures "becoming visible" before me, out of their own darkness.
Though they never fully materialized, they were there and they were real,
and the words that came to mind were: "The Wedding Guests have
arrived..."

I knew in an instant who these beings were and what I had to do. I rushed
into the studio and began subjecting pictures of owls to the whirlwind of the
machine. I cut out several heads and fixed them instantly in the right places.
These were the Owl People, the messengers and guides between here and
there. They were the ones who unveiled the Red Table and made it ready for
the Wedding Night...

When this photomorph arrived at Lamantia's door, as he later told me, he

had just finished writing the lines:

Shamans at Mount Diablo touched by antlers of light

Invisible bears crowding the coast of almond shell vestments

I'm at the owl haunts of the sacral redwood grove

 The Weddings Guests have arrived...

A PHOTOMORPH IN SEVEN VESSELS

"I ask for the profound, the veritable occultation of

surrealism."

From one into the other, into another, the question of

duality is resolved in the luminous solution of the
Photomorphose. Within the morphological structure, the
barely terrestrial flesh is pure and unreasonable in its
clarity. The Woman in her reflection is the chromatic
aberration glimmering through the bones. She moves as the
lighted water and the sleepless gaze, more irritable than a
phantom limb, or a phantom landscape. The parallel is
more dangerous and closer to witchcraft, black magic and
sorcery, and the transposed images of spells and
conjurations... which never fail to come true. When she
closes her eyes she speaks with moisture in the air: "I am
both the shadow and the brightness around it..."

The magical art of Photomorphosis involves the inward

dismantling of the world; the dissolving, evaporating,
distilling and refining of matter... the fiery drowning,
the murderous flowering... A crystal clear darkness of
being is wrought by a poetic sadomasochism.

You touch her shadow with excruciating tenderness, with

a scalpel, you play with it and make it hum, seduce it into
tiny little circles that spin with ever-increasing speed...
One drop of its unsettling cobalt purity is placed on the
surface of her voice, and her pleasure is a handful of
golden dust tossed into the air... Strange dreams are
inevitable...

Knowledge is a mirror held up in darkness... and the

destruction of memory (at the core of which, dazzling
and mysterious, is the presence of an "I" that might not
really be there, where it seems to be, but elsewhere), is
the process of becoming transparent and more all
inclusive...
She is the slender tripod of intrauterine stars that drip like
blood down onto the central feasting place, in the heart of
which tomorrow is but a memory... a glowing carcass of
an unspeakable dance...

The art of the coven, the ceremony, the ritual, the

nuptial and the game... erotic delirium of sudden
encounters, newly transformed according to the desire
of the beings and objects that have come to inhabit their
own space and time.

"I am the pool of brightness around the dark solution;

dip your hands into it and smear it over your body, wreak
havoc on the tide that binds, and mesmerize... pierce it,
and myth it... take away its life and give it moonlight, then
revive it and breathe it in..."

A carnival of the imagination, an erotic spectacle, a

singular alchemy of the marvelous...

When you rub the animal of her ghostly flesh, sunlight

comes in through a flaw in the earth like honey, is poured
back and forth between her twin daughters "Sinister"
and "Hallucination", and the flame that results is like an
invisible web draped over the landscape... When you
speak to her, it is an eloquent dive...

Photomorphosis is the result of an absolute belief in the

transformative power of the imagination.

She is the center of The Bewitching Ceremony, which is

both diurnal and diluvial, and forms the crystallized
scaffolding that arouses the space around it with its
turbulent thoughts... like clairvoyant limbs, like vessels,
like doorways through which can be seen the glittering
forms of the wedding night.

The imagination is a flaw in the universe through which

things pass back and forth along the luminescent fibers
of desire, between interior and exterior, between this
world and others...

'The whole is complex, varied and startling. It is alive, it

makes your hair stand on end. The mastery of fire, the
cardinal and intercardinal points, the activation of the
interior sun called solarization, the spell-casting birdlike
dance, the skeletal buzzing... the exchange of rubies and
emeralds for links to supernatural places. The tripartite
zoning on the glowing field, representing masculine and
feminine, procreation and regeneration. All comes under
the rubric of magical transport...'

The imagination is always an incessant projectory

towards the future, and an evolutionary process, or
force... In that respect it is a subversive activity... its aim
is nothing short of a fervent reconciliation of conflict, a
ruthless fulfillment of desire, and a drive toward
absolute freedom.

On the Red Table the witch disrobes in a field of stars...

She is coaxing out the luminous glow of "Here and
There", pulling it upward and shaping it, caressing it,
making love to it and spreading it out in every direction...
ascending and descending the vertical plane with its moist
black fur, folding it inwards, throwing it in transparent
sheets that shimmer and reflect the psychological
inclusions...

The imagination is neither moral nor immoral, striking

out into territory which has no need for such
distinctions or distractions. It fears neither life nor
death, but conspires with them in the illusion of space
and time. It has no restrictions and follows exclusively
the pleasure principle... Nor is it constrained to logical
modes of perception... Its reality is ever changing and
capable of the most far-fetched solutions.

Photomorphosis is an instrument of the imagination... a

dangerous instrument, a weapon...

The magical art of Photomorphosis is an art of the

perverse... the veiled-eroticism of the spirit, unsettling
and desirable. It reaches for the realm of prurient
delights as it roams, and caresses the earth, air, fire and
water of the imagination. It contains the power it
represents... It becomes soluble at dawn... It refuses to
go away...
 Restructuring the Crystal...

The Phantom Beast

The forcing of darkness to an extreme intensity, to such

a degree as to cause a delirious luminosity, which calls
into play all the primary senses to perceive brightness as
a species of transparency... in the sense that "species"
indicates a living condition. Brightness moves, dreams
and explores itself, and appears as a different kind of
reflection in the world around us. Images haunted by
the very power of their inherent, genetic projectivity
into a field which comes to meet them in magnetic
response and presenting brief flashes of recognition in
the chiaroscuro of perception... from scintillating color,
to sepia, to black and white, to radiance, and the
psycho-luminescent spectrum of "both, yet neither." It
is in this glow, this shifting of consciousness from one
shadow of being to another, that comes closest to the
speed of light (when not seen) and the condition of
living and dying in a single image (when recognized).
*

The "I" is a causality of light, a reflection of the glow of

things back into itself, as this glow returns to its source.
By the same method the Morphos butterfly has no
natural color, but a dazzling iridescent blue that is the
reflection of light on the morphological structure of its
wings.

Ceremony of the Veil...

 WHAT IS PHOTOMORPHOSIS?

Don't let the dark, overly serious aspect of these images

throw you off balance, or annoy you. It was never my
intention to portray any sort of sardonic brilliance or
mysterious alchemical significance known only to initiates.
I did not begin this work with any artistic ambitions or
aesthetic concerns, nor did I intend to mystify by being
overly and irritatingly inexplicable...

In truth, I neither had nor have now any intentions, or

aspirations what so ever. The discovery of photomorphosis,
of my method was an accident, pure and simple. I was
using the photocopier to reproduce some article about Yves
Tanguy in a magazine and accidently moved the pages
while the machine was copying. The resulting sheet of
paper contained, if I recall, what looked like Tanguy
imagery blown up, a strange image that visually was a
mixture of blurred ghostly patterns and sharp jagged edges
of something very strange stopped suddenly in motion.
This certainly fascinated me and I simply decided to
explore it.

I cannot convey the absolute joy and sense of playful

exploration that came from the discovery of
photomorphosis. I started moving other things on the copy
machine; whatever illustrations I could get my hands on. I
was so carried away with this activity, and the spontaneous
generation of such strange imagery, that I had amassed
almost 400 pages and had no idea what to do with it all. I
just looked at them, marvelling at the shapes that seem to
have been conjured out of nowhere... and how reality could
be altered simply by moving it around a little.

Several months later, while looking at a book of collages

by Max Ernst, it suddenly dawned on me to start cutting out
the most interesting parts and collage them together.
Certainly, these parts didn't look like anything natural, nor
did the ground on which I placed them resemble any place I
had seen before...

There may have been one "intention" over all, and that was
not to use anything recognizable, that resembled something
else, when cutting out these 'parts'. I enjoyed only the most
unknown, never-before-seen things. The more unknown,
the easier these things fell into place.

The humor in this work turned out to be the recognition of

recognizable things that had escaped my notice when
placing them into the work, only to be seen later as part of a
face, for instance, or a group of people in the dark
background. It was annoying, yet extremely humorous.
The subversion of a machine specifically designed to copy
static images and documents, and turning it into a device
for the incitement and capture of movement... into a
recorder of unconscious activity and desire: this is also very
humorous, and contrary as well.

This reversal acts as an antithesis, balancing with the thesis

of the original intention (the static reproduction of things as
they are), and providing a 'movement' or intervention of
things as they could be... as one desires them to be. This
dialectic is the central motif, or prime motive that
personifies my work... the balancing act, between this and
that, here and there; between the real and the imaginary.
The essense of photomorphosis, as a synthesis of the two.
The Dream Period is what I have called the early
explorations, all of the works leading up to the first series.
Very psychological, obsessive and magical, these early
works uncovered the place and personnages, the hybrid
beings, and the world of photomorphosis.

Random Acts of Desire was the first series, and was

essentially the tentative Great Work, which I attempted for
various reasons, among them the possibility of eminent
death (which later turned out to be a false assumption), and
perhaps a desire for organization and completion.

Luminous Vessels was the companion to Random Acts of

Desire. It was the feminine component or compliment, the
sister, the lover, in an alchemical sense, the soror mystica
of the later.

Splendor Solis was the last series and the final phase of
Photomorphosis. Begun in 1993 and finished in January of
2000, this series of 22 works was not merely a culmination
of everything I had done since 1973, but an attempt to go
beyond that personal history. I began the series as an
exploration of the unfettered imagination, attempting to
delve as deeply as possible into the source out of which
evolved magic, sorcery and the occult, shamanism,
alchemy and surrealism...

This last series turned out to be a summation of the past,

and an ending, because I had grown weary of my method,
and abandoned the copy machine, replacing the tiny
granules of black toner with the even smaller pixels of the
computer.

The Secret Art of Photomorphosis was written as an

exploration of the method of Photomorphosis, and a final
summation... the closing of the work.

_____________________

Note of Explication concerning the History of the Photomorphic Method:

1. The first known usage of Photomorphogenesis was in 1959, which was

used to supercede the word Photomorphosis, as being more descriptive of
the effects of sunlight on plants, the metamorphosis induced by sunlight.
The word Photomorphosis was thus abandoned - until 1973, when I
discovered that by moving things on an ordinary photocopy machine
(exposing them to light, while in motion) I created a new 'species' of image.
I combined the words photographic and metamorphosis, into
photomorphosis. When researching the library to see if such a word existed,
I was told that "photomorphosis" was no longer used, and that
photomorphogenesis was the accepted word. Thus, photomorphosis was
appropriated, and given a new meaning. Photomorphosis was from that
moment on a part of surrealist methodology. It became a theory of delirious
navigation, a weapon against the mundane.

2. The activity itself was called morphing, out of which photomorphs

presented themselves. J. H. Matthews in his book Les Mystres De La
Chambre Noire; le surralisme et la photogrphie, published by Flammarion,
Paris, in 1982. It is the most comprehensive volume on the myriad uses of
photography in the history of surrealism. "The Photomorphosis of J. Karl
Bogartte was of capital importance..." -J.H. Matthews.1980. Paris.
 THE MYSTERIES OF THE BLACK CHAMBER

Edouard Jaguer, 1982

A deeper investigation of the photomorphosis processwith or

without the use of the photocopiershould yield a lot of
interesting results, for reasons that are even more interesting.

The marvelous images that follow were born on the

shores of Lake Michigan. They are the work of J. Karl
Bogartte, one of the leading members of the US
Surrealist Group, founded in 1966 by the poets
Penelope and Franklin Rosemont, editors of the
review Arsenal (this group is presently the only really
structured and at the same time undoubtedly the
most active in the international surrealist
movement). Bogartte thinks, and rightly so, that
Everythingincluding ourselvesis moved by the
obsessively beautiful conquest of the irrational. Of
course, one needs to invent the means of getting to
this irrational, a problem that each great creator
solved in his or her own way, taking into account, or
not, the achievements of his or her predecessors.
Like Man Ray, Vane Bor, Ubac and many others,
Bogartte took up automatism again: Automatism
he says remains one of the most necessary tools in
freeing from slavery the truest products of the
activity of the spirit. Art is the clue left at the scene
of the crime. It is also its evidence. The crime is
freedom, this radiant digression into the revelations
of desire.
Paradoxically, Bogartte uses for this liberating end
one of the modern inventions that would seem a
priori the least suited to do so: the photocopier, on
whose plate he places all kinds of illustrations, or
fragments of illustrations regardless of their
contents: landscapes, machines and naked women,
especially naked women, with eggs and forks, tinfoil,
etc. Movement is the key process, as opposed to the
natural function of the photocopier of recording the
absence of movement and being a simple imitator.
Hence the term of photomorphosis, which means
change or transformation of an organism by means
of light. One should mention here the self-copies
of Theodore Brauner; and the reader () will
probably be surprised by the fact that two creators of
the same movement obtained at about the same
time such different results by using the same
impassible mechanism.

On the plane of the pure fascination that Breton

talked about, the entities that give free rein to their
frolics (The Strange Confrontation) are as magical,
humorous and marvelous as the various sprites,
vampires and chimeras, which appeared on the
scene of pictorial automatism with Matta, Esteban
Francs, or Kamrowski (who is, like Bogartte, a
member of the American Surrealist Group). In some
cases Bogartte cuts up again the images obtained in
this way and combines collage and photomorphosis,
by adding sometimes fragments of photosimages
of birds or butterflies, animal species that he has an
elective affinity for (The Wedding Guests Have
Arrived).
The contribution of Bogartte to the field of
experimental photography can be already considered
of major importance. By combining the different
contributions of the photogram, photo-drawing and
the so-called action painting (by moving rapidly
elements under the light) and the situationist
diversion of the photocopier, a machine which is as
practical as it is forbidding, the photomorphosis
appears to us as the epitome of the latest research.
As such, the fantasy set free by this dream alchemy
is considered by us worthy in all respects of
participating in the final bouquet of fireworks that
surrealist photography has been for sixty years.

Translated by Sasha Vlad.

Les Mystres De La Chambre Noire; le surralisme et la photogrphie,
by Edouard Jaguer, was published by Flammarion, Paris, in 1982. It is
the most comprehensive volume on the myriad uses of photography in
the history of surrealism.
Surrealism and Photography

"Of a time when the beasts (fools) spoke," it had

been possible for a ring of magic fairies to transform
pumpkins into carriages. The fact that this never
existed only gave the poets a reason to invent it.
However, the fundamental idea of the world says
"reality" will have evolved considerably over the next
20 years and the "machine" under which all beings
will have progressively invested our familiar literary
domain, as much as and more than in the animal
world of old, the attempt is great for these same
poets to go on much longer, dreaming up these
"machines."

Bogartte's work is like the point of a lightning rod

that simultaneously attracts the legendary storms of
the past and those which are to come... He is
affecting the machines that will dream.

-Edouard Jaguer - October 1984

Excerpts from a slightly abridged English version which was to have
been used elsewhere... Translated by Genelle Lange.