This article contains adult content. Days after a blizzard, a photographer and her subject snuck into the abandoned Port Authority Grain Terminal in Red Hook at dawn. In the freezing cold, with security guards nearby, the model, covered in white body paint and wearing a wig, stripped nude, and Laura Weyl began to photograph her, staying completely silent to avoid being caught. The resulting series is Ghost, an investigation into the energies of certain spaces.
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Weyl, a New York-based photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia artist, sees her photographs as a chance to connect with her more instinctual side—exploring sexuality and city life through purposefully extreme images. The subject of Ghost is Julia Sinelnikova, a model and multimedia artist, who did a residency at Banff Centre earlier this year. Also known as The Oracle, Sinelnikova collaborated with Weyl on Ghost. The moments that they have captured together, Weyl says, take both photographer and model out of the trivial experiences of the everyday.
Weyl, who is concerned by the commodification of images and the excess of visual data presented through social media, wants to push herself and her models to step outside of normal forms of expression. In doing this, she hopes to return to a more instinctual, spiritual side of herself. As the sun rose that morning in Red Hook, Weyl describes being flooded by an ecstasy. She and Sinelnikova fled the building, climbing several fences to safety. What they have captured in Ghost exudes some of this intense energy—the images glowing with a sense of liberation.
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