‘The Dreamers' is a series of large format portraits of sleepers inspired by Francisco De Goya’s painting The Dream (El Sueño) c.1800.
Goya painting beautifully captures the the vulnerability of the sleeper, her complete unconsciousness, and the unsettling, enigmatic closeness of the state of sleeping to death.
Sleeping and dreaming are fundamental experiences we all share. For many thousands of years people have speculated on the purpose of dreams, they were believed to be a way of communicating with the dead, they acted as warnings or messages from the gods, a way of predicting the future. In the 17thcentury ‘spectral evidence’, testimonies based on dreams of visions of the witness, were allowed in court during the European witch hunts. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud believed that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious. Why we dream still remains a deep mystery.
The photographs were shot on a large format 5 x 4 camera. They were taken at night while people slept in their own beds. The sleepers opened the shutter before they went to sleep and closed it again when they woke in the morning.