In two phases over a period of ten years, I photographed 30 psychotherapists in the Los Angeles area. Therapy has been an important undertaking for me over time. It’s a private experience that I wanted to acknowledge publicly, and an act of honoring therapists within their workspaces. While shooting, I would sit where the client might choose to sit. I wondered about the photograph’s potential to describe therapy by way of an expression, gesture or spatial relationship. Is a look of empathy or compassion inherent to the process of therapy, or the personality of the therapist? Is it possible to achieve that look or effect when the therapist, and not the client, is the subject of the interaction? I posed these questions while photographing, and these pictures are informed by those conversations.
Hot Rocks (youth stack), 2016