Photography bridges between self-model and embodied body

“End up”. Self-portrait Alice Odilon 2008. Copyright. All rights reserved.

As a french woman photographer, I’ve devoted my passion and my prose to photography.

(Leonard Shengold  maintains that is this vital connection of prose and passion that constitutes insight.)

…..And through photography and with it, to women rights.

Practising Fine Art of Photography gave me access to reality and palpable thoughts and brainy feelings.

Art drove me through a long philosophic research, vital search of sense of my life and my destiny.

I spent 25 years working about woman identity, my embodied soul, my anorexic self and my healthy self, and my unconscious mind, living as a blind woman led by her secret unconscious.

I didn’t know what I was doing, I created pictures I didn’t understood but I went ahead.

I was anorexic, disembodied person, wit a huge power, sharp-eyed, seeing myself instead to feel myself.

I didn’t see with my body, I saw it, I had an “out of body” disembodiment, I felt the monstruous lack of my own body.

I was not in my body, I thought it, I didn’t feel it.

I had a metaphorical body image, I dreamed my body.

I saw me as a X, a ghost dressed in a white blouse gesticulating in a naked landscape.

1977. Copyright Alice ODILON. All rights reserved.

My body was a “body image” and was not transparent but like a death skin (a shade)protecting me from the looksthat could kill from my Mother.

I stayed alive but without my body.

I was a sort of Peter Pan.

If I would lost my shade I would die.

I was expecting a lot about my self model, this dead skin, this ultime shade.

It was my only perception of myself and believed in it as my identity, my unique true supreme identity.

So I was happy to not being in my struck dumb body which was a sacrificial thing for my Mother, until the day it decided to scream as a huge wound, a wide opening burning hole with a blood lava flow and tears.

“Little ghosty girl trying to reunit top and bottom”.1977. Copyright Alice ODILON.

Then my body compelled me to deal with it as a team with my self model, or leave.

This ultimatum of suffering haled me to choose between total immersion in self-model or make an accomodation with real “bloody” body and my brainy head, and therefore continuing to live.

A sort of Epiphany had happened in my life: I was able to bridge between my feelings and my thoughts,

between my self-model and my embodied body, between my inner and my outer body.

I’ve understood that {“we are not single, indivisible whole, but there are parts of us that can become affected, and parts that remain separate and therefore able to be an internal healer”.}

(Matthew Campling-Therapy Today/June 2006).

“Le leurre”. 1977. Copyright Alice ODILON. No Clone is free.

I recovered the energy to laugh and to feel pleasure, pain, without fear.

My symptom of the emptiness vouching for my own survival and security of my self-model, became a {“momentory twinge”}.

Bodily X metaphor of anorexia. Self-portrait Alice Odilon. Copyright 1977

(Ellen Siegelman – Metaphor and meaning in Psychotherapy).

Because emptiness asks finally for supply of food or feelings or relationships.

I became to have bulimia crisises which drove me to loss of self control.

Coming back to my self-model after vomiting, exhausted, thoroughly purged and emptied, I was obliged to admit allowing food or outer world to come inside me.

I became able to override time to time my hegemonic target of emptiness.

It became just a dream and not anymore a moral and physical obligation.

I knew I had to compromise my absolute faith of emptiness in order to taste my life, to enter into my life.

The metaphor of emptiness using by my body to express my psyche, told I felt invisible, I didn’t feel visible.

My emptiness experience of the anorexic figure was as if it was real.

I was feeling ghostly and it was extremely uncomfortable.

I saw my self as a soul dressed in a white blouse floating in a landscape.

The only thing I was sure was that people considered only my body image, and that I saw them only as images, unreal persons.

I didn’t get access to my feelings.

But practicing photography gave me the possibility to confront my fantasy with the palpable reality; to paste them together, and then to play with them, and finally to leave them co-exist.

Alice ODILON