"See & Tell": Color Phototherapy

By Sara Medina

Images that reveal secrets in the viewer's heart

A swooping swimmer in churning blue water, a nearly invisible running horse latticed with bands of light, a jagged greenish swirl, a diver poised before takeoff. These photographs, ranging from impressionism to clear abstraction, are the work of Joel Walker, a gifted amateur cameraman, who took them for his amusement and then was pleased enough with the results to hang them on the walls of his Toronto office as decoration.

Walker, 39, is a psychiatrist. These four, and six other images, began to elicit comments from his patients, often providing him with a catalyst for therapeutic talk, an opening to the patient's preoccupations. Soon Walker began asking whether any of the photographs stirred an emotional response. "People expressed feelings," he says, "and at appropriate moments I could break through initial resistance and get to the heart of their problem." One of Walker's patients, a man in his 30s, complained of chest pains and feared heart attacks, even though cardiologists could find nothing wrong with him. Walker assumed the problem was psychosomatic, but could not get the man to talk freely. One day Walker happened to ask him how he felt about the running horse photograph, and the image provoked a sudden torrent of rage against the man's neglectful father that he had previously been unable to express. "The picture clearly triggered this awareness," says Walker. "As he began to deal with his own rage and anger, the pains began to subside and eventually left him."

Walker does not regard the photographs as a diagnostic tool like the Rorschach technique, in which patients describe what they see in inkblots and the responses are scored. Nor does he use them like the Thematic Apperception Test, in which viewers reveal personality patterns by constructing stories from a series of pictures. Instead he uses the images as an emotional icebreaker: "The initial response gives me cues about where to go from there." But Canadian Psychologist Paul Lerner, an expert on the Rorschach method believes Walker's approach may very well become a new diagnostic tool for assessing personality. "Like the Rorschach," Lerner says, "it could be used to show what aspect the patient pays attention to and what he ignores."

Phototherapy, in fact, is not new; an English surgeon (and pioneer photographer) named Hugh Diamond used pictures of madwomen in his work with mental patients in the mid-19th century. But photography has only recently come into serious psychotherapeutic use, and it still tends to involve patients' responses to images of themselves or members of their immediate family. No one before Walker has collected reactions as systematically, or from as many people.

The reason is that he also became interested in learning how the general public would respond to the images. Would these viewers perceive the images differently? Would their reactions be more or less intense? Two years ago, Walker organized a "participatory exhibit" of his prints called "See & Tell," at Manhattan's Nikon House. Under each print were two boxes, labeled TAKE IT and LEAVE IT. Viewers could remove a card from one box and record their impressions, then drop it in the other box. They could also sample other people's opinions. "I had no intention of doing therapy on all of New York City," says Walker.

So far nearly 3 million people have seen Walker's pictures at exhibitions in Toronto, Mexico City and New York, and in a U.S. high school student magazine. He has correlated thousands of comments in order to gauge just how evocative each picture is and how strong the response to it. Of the prints, the blue swimmer stirred the most emphatic responses and the largest number of positive reactions: "lightness and freedom," "a loving, warm companion." But one woman felt frighteningly "submerged." Viewers found the greenish abstraction disturbing or threatening, calling it "demonic" or "evil." One even described it as "death reflected in a pool."

The running horse suggested aggression, power and turbulence. The diver, perhaps predictably, evoked loneliness and despair: "readying himself for a suicide leap," "on top of a cliff, thinking about life after death." Said a husband: "All I see is a man on a board going to dive."

Said his wife: "I was not aware of a diver at all. It's so much more. It's isolation."

Walker emphasizes there is no right or wrong way to interpret the images. Still, he has derived some general themes and response patterns: all types of viewers, for example, found the same images most and least evocative. But there were significant cultural differences. Mexicans were more explicit in their feelings than New Yorkers or Canadians, and showed almost no sexual or erotic suggestions in their responses. Expressing negative feelings, Mexicans usually spoke of "sadness," while their northern neighbors often reached for words like "despair" and "suicide." "The major differences," says Walker, "were in the degrees of feelings evoked and the ways they were expressed." To discover whether there may be cultural response patterns elsewhere, Walker plans to take "See & Tell" to London, Paris and Tokyo. "I hope," he says, "we may be able to either dispel or confirm many existing cultural stereotypes." --By Sara Medina. Reported by Nancy Pierce Williamson/New York

With reporting by Nancy Pierce Williamson/New York

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.