Cover Image: Sarah Schoenfeld: All You Can Feel (MDMA detail)
After working in notorious Berlin nightclubs for years, photographer Sarah Schoenfeld who had ample exposure to the realities of drugs wanted to know how these effect of euphoric substances look like. So she decided to bypass her voyeuristic gaze by taking a range of mind-altering substances and placing them directly onto developed photo negatives.
Turning her studio into a laboratory, Sarah squeezed drops of various legal and illegal liquid drug mixtures onto exposed film, blowing them up to large scale prints that reveal incredible shapes and colours, and the unique inner universes hiding within these substances. These portraitures of drugs is the closest we could get to a visual scientific representation. At the same time being unreliable due to its non controlled scientific environment, we could only possibly assume its fantastical form of the drugs. The body of work, titled All You Can Feel, consists of bizarre images of heroin, cocaine, MDMA and other drugs. The work is meant to explore the relationship between alchemy, pharmacy and psychology, but also emerges as a visually interesting and sophisticated photography series.
All You Can Feel is now available as a book through Kerber Press.
Image Source: beautifuldecay.com