Allan Teger

My Bodyscape photographs were never intended to be about bodies. As a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, I was teaching about the psychology of consciousness. The major idea behind my courses was that our consciousness determines the meaning of what we experience. If we change our consciousness, we change our experience. I was looking for a way to show in art, what I was teaching. I wanted to help the viewer experience a shift in consciousness, where their original interpretation was replaced by a new interpretation. It was my hope that such an experience might generalize, and the viewer would realize that changing our perception or perspective was possible in a variety of situations. I had miniature skiers for my children’s model railroad and it occurred to me that I might place them on a body – causing a shift in perspective whereby what looked like a landscape was revealed to be a body. It was not intended as a trick or illusion – but rather as a lesson in the subjectivity of perception.