Harris Mizrahi is a photographer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY where he currently lives and often departs to wander and photograph throughout the country. His work concentrates on vulnerability and portraiture.
About ‘Inside Out‘:
I began working on “Inside Out” as an excuse to escape. Battling the deep depression and seductive mania of my bipolar disorder, I would drive as far as I could from home before tiring, much of the time with no thought of returning. Sometimes I might stay on the road for a couple of days—sometimes weeks or months. At other times I could travel hundreds of miles only to return right back home that same day. Emotional exhaustion, whether healthy or not, was an essential ingredient in the making of many of these photographs.
The trips are a form of therapy where my own state of vulnerability and desire to be accepted allow me to sympathize with and photograph the people I meet with honesty, empathy and an intimacy not typically awarded to strangers.
When photographing strangers, there is an inherent suspicion shared on both sides of the camera. As a photographer I am soliciting my subjects’ vulnerability, and in return I must openly cede my own. As a result I am allowed into people’s homes, to share their dinner and often rest a night on a spare bed.
However, the photographs present a dichotomy. Although they may be created with honest intention, they are not factual, nor are they intended to be. They straddle a line between fantasy and reality, never quite falling to either side of that line. The end result is a story of a place and people that do not truly exist outside of these photographs.
