In almost half of my photographic investigations my subjects have to be hunted down, trapped or deceived even, in order to reveal the secret that my mysterious employers hire me to unveil. And as you know, most of the times that secret is unknown to me and I have to work following clues and hints. So, every assignment is in a way, the shooting of a film noir, following an improvised scenario that me and my subjects write and direct on the spot. But in the great majority of the cases the subjects are clearly in a “fight or flight” mode, so there is action and suspense as I try to “convince” them -with great subtlety, of course- to get into a “stay and play” mode. This photographic investigation was different though, in more than one ways. The one you are allowed to know is that this subject was a chameleon -as you will see in my following posts- , she knew I was investigating her and she had no fear. her natural state was already :stay and play”. Undoubtedly, a challenge for a photographic investigator like me… But them, I can handle anything…
I was revisiting a photographic investigation and then I heard a recording of a repeated affirmation by Dr Joseph Murphy: “I am the captain of my soul, I am the master of my fate. For my thoughts and feelings are my destiny”. It made sense. It makes sense.
A photographic investigator knows that the most revealing and successful photographic investigations are the ones that happen in between assignments, the ones that she doesn’t care how they will end up or the ones that are already done and therefore are considered no big deal.
Prentice Mulford said: “The man -or woman- who succeeds must always in mind or imagination, live, move, think and act as if he -or she- had gained that success, or he -or she- will never gain it”. I was hired to photographically investigate Zenobia’s journey to the manifestation of her desires. “Something new, something wonderful” was the theme of the investigation. And a photographic investigator helps her subjects through manifestation having faith in them. “Faith is the power to believe and the power to see”, Prentice Mulford also said…
A photographic investigation that took place while I was reflecting on the answer Neville Goddard gave to the question: “How could one who was deprived in his youth become a success in life?”
A photographic investigator does is not engaged all the time in traveling between dimensions or through time… She has mundane tasks to fulfil, just like any other “non photographic investigator” being. In that case I was reviewing a photographic investigation that took place some days before while I was steaming some organic broccoli and potatoes for my mother, listening at the same time an audiobook by Emily Cady, where telepathy was mentioned. My subject was a secret agent from a different time-space (I had investigated her so many times before but she always managed to surprise me). My conclusion (which came as an epiphany) after many investigations I did on her, was that surrealism and lack of coherence seemed to slow her down, giving me more time to photographically investigate her before she disappeared. Thus the title .
A photographic investigator knows that water is the best cure against photo-bombers. Give them a bottle or a glass of water and instead of sabotaging the investigation, they inadvertently contribute to it…
It was the afternoon of a busy day and my photographic investigation was taking place without me being fully aware of it, surrounded by the beautiful sounds of blackbirds and the sounds of the birds that I could hear in Takashi Kokubo’s album “Jamaica” that was the soundtrack of this assignment. Zenobia was tired and lacked oxygen. I didn’t go to the Jamaica soundscape to investigate, but I did it anyway.
Photographic Investigators love to watch old black and white films and thats what I was doing just before i re-investigated a photographic investigation that took place 5 years ago in Burano. My assignment then was the mysterious Jackie O’Can -you might remember her from previous blog posts- and after watching “The Crystal Ball”, a 1943 movie, I was inspired to look for more clues in this investigation. And I found them.
She was hiding behind a COVID silk mask that she wore -allegedly- to protect others from her lethal breath. My job was to photographically investigate her with the mask and I must admit that this was one of the most surreal assignments that had been given to me by my mysterious employers. It was a challenge. But I am an inter-dimensional photographic investigator and I tend to laugh in the face of challenge…
When my career as a photographic investigator started, i didn’t know it did. It was night time, I was in a bar and I was shooting casual portraits of Dorian K., a man that in the 1st of May of that year saved my life. Now that I think about it, maybe I was shooting him to show him that he did the right move saving me, although he didn’t have a choice - it was a compulsive move. This man proved to be an angel, a messenger on behalf of my mysterious “employers” that from that day on, started giving me mysterious assignments about people and places that needed to be photographically investigated, which I had to discover by myself, following cryptic leads and clues. (Up to this day, I haven’t discovered the identity of my mysterious employers but I loved each and every one of my assignments). The first clues were given to me that night by Dorian K. and at the same time my first photographic investigation was completed.
This photographic investigation took place 5 years ago in the einsteinian universe, but in the world of an inter-dimensional photographic investigator there is no time.
A few days before the lockdown, I was reading James Allen’s “As a Man thinketh”, a book that proved to be very helpful during the photographic investigation that took place then and the results of which you see here. The following quote reflects accurately the spirit of the investigation… “Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself. The outer world of circumstance shapes itself to the inner world of thought, and both pleasant and unpleasant external conditions are factors which make for the ultimate good of the individual. Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.“
“Because I am what I am, I may be what I will to be. My individuality is one of the modes in which the Infinite expresses itself, and therefore I am myself that very power which I find to be the innermost within of all things.”
A photographic investigator is mostly interested the renewing of their mind while observing the renewing of their subjects mind, emerging fresh and vibrant after every photographic investigation. Complete forgetfulness seems to have a lot to do with this renewing… Like Prentice Mulford, in his book “Your forces and how to use them”, says: “To learn to forget is as necessary and useful as to learn to remember. We think of many things every day which it would be more profitable not to think of at all. To be able to forget is to be able to drive away the unseen force (thought) which is injuring us, and change it for a force (or order of thought) to benefit us.”
That is the main question that’s popping in a photographic investigator’s mind in days where photographic investigations are an underground activity and mysterious viruses infect mysteriously a mysteriously large percentage of mysteriously selected parts of the planet. Being a big Doctor Who fan, I am one of those photographic investigators that wonders… But, the thing with The Doctor is that he is probably here working on the situation, but we have missed him just because we were looking for him. So I am reviewing some of my latest photographic investigations just in case my camera took a glimpse of him without me noticing. It happens very often…
A photographic investigation very often looks like hunting or following appearances, the illusory world that we live in, but in reality is about standing still. A very powerful affirmation (by Florence Scovel Shinn) that I always use in the face of apparent adversity in my photographic investigations is: “I am unmoved by appearances, therefore appearances move”. And they always do.
Emmet Fox said: “You are not happy because you are well. You are well because you are happy. You are not depressed because trouble has come to you, but trouble has come to you because you are depressed. You can change your thoughts and feelings, and then the outer things will come to correspond, and indeed there is no other way of working”. A photographic investigator’s job consists, partly, in proving, photographically, the truth of what she believes in. Like the quote from Emmet Fox, mentioned above.
A photographic investigator knows that her subjects have been instructed, early in their life, to start constructing a story about themselves -enriched over the years with bits of experience, failures, successes, oppressed feelings and desires- and then believe it to be true. So naturally they get trapped in that story, rarely managing to escape it’s limitations. But she also knows that in a twinkling of the eye this truth can be realised and the subjects can write a different story, preferably one of harmony, radiance, health, wealth, love and perfect self expression. A happy story.
