THE NARCISSISTS
Elizabeth Heyert

Elizabeth Heyert began THE NARCISSISTS, a series of triptych portraits taken through a two-way mirror, in 2006, as an exploration of the unseen intimate relationship we each have to our own image. Her idea was to capture the narcissist's gaze, that knowing, personal, contemplative stare that happens in solitude as we confront ourselves in the mirror. With other portraits taken in a mirror, the photographer and the camera are a visible part of the experience, somewhere beside or behind the subject. Even with a mirror self-portrait, the camera is present and the experience is about being photographed, not solely about a private session of internal and external self-examination. She decided to try to see what the mirror sees, face to face with someone lost in his or her own reflection and unconcerned about scrutiny.

She created a set in her studio, which enabled her to use her portrait camera, an 8 x 10 Deardorff, to photograph through the thick tinted glass of a two-way mirror. Two-way mirrors, the type used in police stations, have a mirrored surface on one side, and a window on the other. She devised an enormous frame for an oversized mirror, large enough to hide her from view on the window side, with a light-tight box for her camera. The walls of the studio were painted black, so that her subjects had a small, room-sized, womb-like chamber in which to contemplate their own images. She asked everyone to give serious thought about how they wanted to dress, and to bring clothing changes in case they felt uncomfortable with the way they looked. Each person she photographed stood on the mirror side, gazing at themselves for 15 minutes, often changing positions and clothing, and even more often, projecting a wide range of subtle emotions. Heyert remained hidden from her subjects on the window side, and did not speak to them during the 15-minute period, although she did observe them through the glass. The final portraits are presented as triptychs to capture the shifting range of expressions.

To her apparent surprise, most people showed little signs of self-love or overt narcissism. Instead, people often drifted into a meditative state that bordered on melancholy. Occasionally people cried. Sometimes, unprompted by Heyert, they undressed. Expressions changed from clownish to wary to wounded to confrontational in a matter of moments. Rarely, but sometimes, there were no easily discernible changes in expression for the entire 15 minutes. According to Heyert all the portraits seemed to emerge from the inner depths of each individual, with little similarity between the person she spoke to before the session and the personality she photographed through the mirror. Virtually every time a session ended, when she made her presence known, her subjects appeared startled to remember she was there.

THE NARCISSISTS is the third and final part of a trilogy that includes Heyert's two previous projects, THE SLEEPERS and THE TRAVELERS. In each her idea was to challenge the conventional wisdom, famously explained by Richard Avedon, that a photographic portrait is the relationship between two people, the photographer and his or her subject. In THE SLEEPERS, a series of nude portraits of people sleeping for three hours at a time, her subjects were unconscious and unaware of the presence of a photographer. She then photographed THE TRAVELERS, a series of formal portraits of people taken after their deaths. While she has said that she often felt a strong bond with her postmortem subjects, she also recognized that any relationship she felt existed solely in her imagination. With THE NARCISSISTS, Heyert again assumes a role as observer and voyeur. She is the hidden camera, the quintessential outsider, watching without communicating while her subjects remain solitary and undisturbed. Stendhal has a character in Le Rouge et Le Noir who says of a classic narcissist: "She looks at herself instead of looking at you, and so doesn't know you". In Elizabeth Heyert's THE NARCISSISTS something subtly different occurs. Her subjects look at themselves instead of looking at her, or us, or the camera, and reveal how little we really know them.