My Ashtray Heart

I generally don’t do such long readings, but this one was especially interesting and challenging, since it comes as a response to a long dialogue in which another photographer (who aspires to be a teacher of photography) critiqued only its most superficial features. Since I am a semiotician/narratologist, this is a reading of the “deep structure” of this photo, some of which may be unconscious on the artist’s part. A critique can be inferred from it.

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“How sinister and how correct….” (“My Ashtray Heart” - Placebo)

A placebo is a “fake” drug, usually a sugar pill, that still cures the patient because the patient believes it is an authentic drug. The word actually means “I will please.” An ironic name for a band with such generally dark songs. I suppose there is an associative connection then, between this self portrait and the “Ashtray Girl” in the song called “This Picture,” for which the video ends with the faceless girl (slave?) seeing a Polaroid photo of her own face. This picture. (There is a Polaroid elsewhere in the gallery.)

The story in this photo, by itself, is initially quite dark. The girl is exhaling cigarette smoke, but the suggestion is that it is from her “ashtray” heart, in which burning cigarettes have been smashed out. A very violent story, one in which she is abused, probably by a lover. (At least that is the figurative suggestion. Psychologically, the narrative is that she feels like such a girl.)

There’s another strong subtext for this picture in the same gallery. It’s the one in which the girl is standing beside an X-ray (apparently of her own lungs). In that one, she is faceless. The title is “The White Shroud”
but it is a multilayered image. The image of the lungs looks like a black butterfly (and actually, the lungs are quite clean). In the lower left of the X-ray is the girl’s heart from her point of view (in a typical X-ray, it would be on the other side, but this one is reversed). If one looks at the white, smoky interior of the girl’s chest, it’s as if the “smoke” from that photo coming out of her mouth in this photo. (Since this photo is more recent, the X-ray photo confirms her heart had been used like an ashtray.)

The smoke obscure’s one of the girl’s eyes. The smoke in conjunction with the title first makes me think of the song “Smoke Gets into Your Eyes” by the Platters. These lyrics:

They said someday you'll find
All who love are blind
Oh, when your heart's on fire
You must realize
Smoke gets in your eyes

But this song is from a different generation. More in resonance with the photographer’s writing, the smoke from this girl’s heart obscures her RIGHT eye. The same eye that Odin gave to Mimir (who literally loses his head) for the gift of wisdom (i.e. the ability to be a seer). The girl’s LEFT eye, which usually represents the moon (yin) is the most prominent feature in the picture. In fact, the composition in general causes the viewer’s eye to criss-cross the frame until it settles on her eye. She sees YOU. Her eye is actually the “eye in the pyramid,” but in this photo the eye is both in its requisite place (at the top of a generally triangular composition enhanced by the triangle outlined by her hair) but also detached from the tilted white pyramid formed by the corner of the window on the right. The girl is an illuminated one. (In keeping with the pyramid imagery, perhaps her heart was weighted against a feather? Perhaps she has been reborn after being figuratively immolated?)

The intersection of the two photos confirms, for me, my initial response to this one, which was to associate it with the 19th-century photos of trance mediums producing ectoplasm – a kind of spiritual essence -- from their lungs during séances. These productions were usually fraudulent, but the idea behind ectoplasm is something scientifically interesting these days, since it prefigures the understanding of the human energy field as a torsion field with a plasma braid running through its center.

So what is the story of this picture? The Ashtray Heart is the inner crucible referred to in the Alchemical process. It is a traumatic and painful process of purifying “burning” that leads to illumination. The black lungs are a butterfly, the cigarette smoke is spiritual essence. The girl is calm, “blowing smoke” (usually done to disguise one’s actions or intentions), but she does not hide the line of sight.

Ectoplasm: [link](paranormal)
Here’s an image that’s less fake-looking:
[link]