BLACK MIRROR (collaboration with Tomasz Lazar)

What can trigger fear? Eldagsen & Lazar create a photographic equivalent of the ‘Black Mirror’ to set off the viewers’ imagination into their very own unconscious mind, unleashing memories and fears.

Boris Eldagsen & Tomasz Lazar

BLACK MIRROR (2018-22)

What can trigger fear?

Analysing scare techniques since 2017, Boris Eldagsen and Tomasz Lazar realised, that the more undefined a threat or a threatening situation might be, the easier it is to project your own fears onto it. A psychological mechanism that resembles the ‘Black Mirror’, a reflective black surface of obsidian, water or oil, that was used by ancient Greeks, Hebrew, Persian and Mayan oracles as a projection space.

Today we know, that if we gaze long enough at a pitch-black surface, our confused sensory-deprived brain projects images and colours, reflections of memories and emotions. Or as Nietzsche would term it: ‘When you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’

Eldagsen & Lazar use this technique to create a photographic equivalent of the ‘Black Mirror’. They set off the viewers’ imagination into their very own unconscious mind, unleashing memories and fears.

My collaborator: TOMASZ LAZAR

Born 1985 in Szczecin, Poland. An independent photographer, a graduate of the West Pomeranian University of Technology, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology. Winner of photography contests in Poland and abroad (e.g. World Press Photo, POY, CHIPP, Sony World Photography Award, the International Photography Award, BZWBK Press Photo, Grand Press Photo, Lumix Festival for Young Journalism. His work was published in newspapers and magazines like: New York Times, Newsweek International, Sunday Times Magazine, New Yorker and Los Angeles Times. Mostly interested in long-term projects that focuses on society and human’s mind.

www.tomaszlazar.pl