On my first night in Baden, I woke up with jetlag. The moon felt like a sign.
Astrid Schaffner
Astrid painted the wall in her living room because there wasn’t a window. After performing a sage smoking ritual, she brings her visitor inside. Using blankets from the sweat lodge in her garden, she makes a bed on the floor. If she feels comfortable with her visitor, they lie down and hold hands. During the session, Astrid reveals her visitor’s spirit animal.
I wanted to know my animal, but I also wanted to take pictures. It felt wrong to do both.
The garden of the shaman, Astrid Schaffner
Gaby Hintermann
The studio of the tarot reader, Gaby Hintermann
Gaby told me to let go of the Nine of Wands and embrace the Queen of Cups.
Nine of Wands – Battle weary, guarder, obstinate, tired, ill, male
Queen of Cups – Emotional depth, intuition, compassion, healing, female
Madlaina Janett
I met Madlaina, an ayurveda healer and midwife, at a cemetery across the street from her home. She told me that after the recent death of her father, she visited a shaman and learned that her spirit animal is an elephant.
Madlaina explained that in ayurveda there are three elements (Doshas) that function like personality types. She used celebrities as analogies.
Vata: Air (Amy Winehouse)
Pitta: Fire (Heidi Klum)
Kapha: Earth (Seth Rogen)
Madlaina said she can usually determine a person’s Dosha quickly. She thought I was a mix of Vata and Kapha.
The three elements also apply to the stages of life.
Vata: old
Pitta: middle
Kapha: young
Madlaina and I are both entering the Vata stage.
While preparing to take Madlaina’s portrait, a crow landed nearby. It flew away before I took a picture. After Madlaina left, I went looking for the crow.
Madlaina Janett, Sihlfeld cemetery
Carmen Rothmayr
Carmen Rothmayr took me to Zürichberg to show me Shinrin Yoku (forest bathing). This mindfulness practice was developed in Japan a response to the 1990’s tech boom. During her four hour guided sessions, participants put away electronics and refrain from speaking. Instead of using cameras, Carmen instructs bathers to use paper window frames to share ‘pictures’.
Emma Kunz
Emma Kunz (1892 – 1963) discovered telepathy and extra-sensory powers as a child. At 18, she began to heal her first patients and also started drawing in exercise books. She began making geometric drawings that were visions of energy fields from which she could formulate diagnoses.
In her forties, Kunz began making large-scale drawings using radiesthesia – a drawing technique where a divining pendulum plots her compositions on graph paper. Kunz would work continuously on a drawing for a period that could stretch over 24 hours.
In 1941, Kunz discovered the healing rock Aion A in a roman quarry. This location is now known as the Emma Kunz Grotto.
Emma Kunz Grotto
I went back to Zürichberg to frame more views, but I’m wondering if it is better to block them.
Jeannine Blum
The roots of the mandrake resemble a human body. For centuries it was associated with myths and magic. According to one legend, when the plant was uprooted it would scream, paralyzing anyone that heard it. Mandrake was previously used as an anesthetic and aphrodisiac, but is highly toxic and can cause hallucinations, seizures, asphyxiation and death.
Jeannine Blum, naturopatyhist, Wettingen Abbey
Dorin Ritzmann
Dorin is a private doctor using traditional non-invasive means such as phytotherapy (herbal medicine), manual medicine (use of the hands for diagnosis and treatment), and medical hypnosis.
In the garden outside her practice, Dorin keeps rescued turtles. This one I photographed is over sixty but likely will live twice as long.
Along with her practice and her gardening, Dorin is an excellent photographer of plants and trees. She also swabbed my cheek and photographed my cells.
Dr. med. Dorin Ritzmann
Dorin gave me gingko drops to use for tinnitus.
Lucas Arnold
A hypnotist asked me to meet in a wooded park near Baden. During our walk, he described the lengthy process he uses to guide his clients. After awhile, I realized that the forest was just a place to meet and that he had no intention of hypnotizing me. I was disappointed, but I enjoyed our walk.
The hypnotist is a believer in logic and was uncomfortable being associated with esotericism. I told him that I don’t necessarily believe mystical forces guided us to the mossy circular boulder, but when I make art I behave as though they do. I chose to photograph the rock instead of the hypnotist.
MariaCristina Teot
During my interdimensional communication session with MariaCristina Teot, she told me that it was important that I spend more time in physical contact with nature, specifically trees. After the session in her office, we visited a park to take pictures. I saw on MariaCristina’s Instagram that she likes to take selfies with fantastic flares of light from the sun positioned behind her. It was too cloudy, but I did my best to get the sun in the picture.
Miriam Meyer
My assistant Beatrice Signorello was asked to join Miriam Meyer’s meditation class for women. The session was in german and I never felt inside the circle. Later I took a portrait of Bea.
Andreas Tröndle & Anina Gmür
Andreas Tröndle and Anina Gmür live on a farm where they combine their passion for 5rhythms dance and permaculture. 5rhythms is a movement meditation practice from the 1970’s that combines shamanism, eastern philosophy, gestalt therapy, transpersonal psychology and mysticism.
Tröndle and Gmür love dancing outside together on music they share on headphones. I chose not to listen while I photographed them. I wonder why I prefer the pictures I took when they weren’t dancing close together.
Corinne Breitenstein
Corinne Breitenstein is a medium that communicates with the dead. She told me that she couldn’t work with me, but she offered to give Bea a reading.
I’m currently on a plane from Zurich to Las Vegas. My time in the Limmat Valley already feels like a dream. I went there with the hope of physical and spiritual rejuvenation. It was successful, but not in the way I expected. Instead of a vegan cleansing I repeatedly ate Schnitzel. Instead of giving myself over to physics and shamans, I took digital pictures. But I feel creatively refreshed. Having treated my journey as though it were guided by unseen forces I found signs as shiny and bright as golden coins in a fairytale.
But what did these signs say?
Looking at that cringy picture of myself in the moonlight when I first arrived, what I see is not a man looking at the moon, but a photographer looking at his camera. But is that so different? Whether one is a mystic gazing toward the heavens or a self-indulgent artist staring into a mirror, one is searching for connection.
Bea and I discussed John Szarkowski’s Book “Mirrors and Windows” in which he wrote:
“There is a fundamental dichotomy in contemporary photography between those who think of photography as a means of self-expression and those who think of it as a method of exploration.
The intention of his analysis has not been to divide photography into two parts. On the contrary, it has been to suggest a continuum, a single axis with two poles.”
Bea and I plotted our own positions on this axis. Bea has a PhD in mathematics and her photography falls a bit on the window side. I try to look out the window, but I rarely escape my own reflection in the glass.
In the Limmat Valley I found many signs, but invariably these shiny coins were little mirrors. I would gaze into people’s eyes and see myself in their pupil.
Perhaps someday I’ll return to Switzerland without my camera. Maybe I’ll even wear a blindfold. Instead of looking at the world through mirrors and windows, I’ll hold the shamans hand, embrace the Queen of Cups, and commune with the forest. Instead of looking into another person’s eyes, I’ll hold them close and dance.
May 1st, 2024.