There is a commonly shared belief among indigenous tribal cultures that the pene-trating gaze of the camera has the power to see beyond the external world into the very essence of one’s soul. It is this sense of the camera’s ability to reveal deeper truths beyond our immediate perception of reality that informs Oakland-based photographer Elisabeth Sunday’s remarkable series of phantasmagoric images of tribal spiritual leaders and exotic botanical still lifes.

Working with both a fixed-frame, fixed-curvature mirror and a flexible, plexiglas-mounted mirror, Sunday manipulates and then photographs the reflected images of her subjects. By bend-ing, distorting and elongating the reflected image, Sunday con-veys the ineffable mysteries at the core of being and makes the spirituality of her subjects a pal-pable reality.
“The mirror makes the invisi-ble visible, and indigenous people, particularly healers, elders and custodians of myths and legends, work with that invisible element,” explains Sunday. “Elongation is an archetype for the spirit in most indigenous cultures, and in that sense the mirror is bringing forward something we would otherwise only sense. It shows the connections between human life and botanical life and deep interior states like meditation.“

It was in the early Eighties, after a period of self-described creative stagnation, that Sunday stumbled on the idea for her latest series of work. According
to Sunday, the inspiration for work-ing with mirrors was derived partly from her fascination with manipulating photographic techniques and processes, as well as a series of vivid dreams inspired by her invocation of the spirit of her grandfather, a noted painter and naturalist who spent time in Africa in the late Twenties collecting and drawing birds, insects and animals at the instigation of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

“I had been making large contact sheets working with 19th-century printing processes like gum bichromate, cyanotype and brown printing, cutting the edges of the negative and trying to morph the interior image,” explains Sunday. “I was always fascinated by surrealism and the reality of dreams, and when working with older techniques I was always looking for ways to break the impression of the reality of photography.”

The major turning point in Sunday’s creative odyssey occurred when she came across a painting made by her grandfather in 1931 of African women with elongated heads, an encounter Sunday says triggered a series of revelatory dreams that provided a road map for her new creative endeavors.

“In the dreams I saw a liquid landscape pouring over itself, running and galloping as if it was solid land and stream at the same time,” recalls Sunday. “I also saw elongated shapes of saguaro cactus and trees, and people in a bizarre liquid/solid setting. I went out to transfer those images straight from my mind to photographic paper.”

Shooting with both 6x7 and 4x5 formats, Sunday positions herself and her subjects side-by-side and at a 45 degree angle to the mirror, which enables her and her subjects to see each other but not themselves. From her position relative to the subject and mirror, Sunday will then work with different ways of posing her subject while also manipulating the mirror to evoke that sense of inner spirituality and mystery.

In order to support her extended photographic sojourns, Sunday underwrites her work through grants and the financial support of private donors in exchange for limited edition portfolios of her images. Sunday does all her own darkroom work, printing up to 30x40 inches in size and adding gold toning to her prints as a final embellishment.
Although Sunday hasn’t yet published her work in book form, her photographs have been reproduced in numerous anthologies and been exhibited at such institutions as the UC Berkeley Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for African-American History and Culture in Washington, DC.—Richard Pitnick