Mucalinda was a serpent king that emerged from the earth and protected Buddha with his hood from a storm. This project is a metaphor of coming to terms with the multiplicity and the convergences of my life, an affirmation of the different moments. When we photograph we feel the power of visual presence. One cannot escape compelling presence. One cannot hide from it. To reject presence creates hostility in one’s soul. Anais Nin calls this kind of searching and location ‘spirit house.’ Every click on the shutter release is a confirmation of ‘presence.’ For me, a photograph could be radiation or it could be radiating. It allows us to reflect on things that take us forward or gave us pause. There is a sense of timelessness and daydreaming. I experienced this kinship with my first camera, a Rollei, at the age of twenty at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico when Georgia O’Keeffe told me, “Let the powers out there guide you.” The impulse to snap the shutter directly links us to mythic absorption which is what the Mexican painter, Leonora Carrington named “down below.” She said if I wanted to heal from a breakup and grow as an artist I would “take the waters in San Jose Purua or mushrooms in Palenque” to access things internal, archetypal, redeemable. Creating photographs of one’s primal self and experimenting with cracking, burning, making dents and stains in the image’s surface unwraps protective layers. One can delve under the skin and into the veil of one’s addictions, obsessions, childhood, marriage, history… My investigation wasn’t just showing myself- it was knowing and self-discovery – an interaction between me and myself. Accepting whom one is, how one looks and what one wants -is very important to me as a woman.

Linda Troeller