Globally people are flocking to plant medicine ceremonies, psychedelics such as Peruvian Ayahuasca, African Iboga or Mexican Peyote, in greater numbers than ever before.
These psychedelics are controversial, however for millennia, indigenous communities have turned to them for physical, psychological and spiritual healing.
The huge numbers embracing these tools is a reflection of the epidemic levels of unhappiness found in fast-paced capitalist societies. It is also a rejection of the orthodox tools our society prescribes as treatment: chemical coshes created by big pharma are sticking plasters at best.
You can see the appeal too of these much more immersive, experiential and insightful tools: the powerful hallucinations and voyages of self-discovery they precipitate can spark otherwise unattainable spiritual awakenings. Conducted by Shamans holding an ancient knowledge handed down over millennia, these plants not only can help you confront and release deep psychological trauma, some suggest, given the multitudes now embracing plant medicines worldwide, that they may prefigure and catalyse just as seismic a cultural shift as we saw in the 1960s Summer of Love and the Acid House movement of the 1980s.
If the society you were born into is as pathologically unwell as ours seems to be, doesn’t it make sense to be deeply sceptical of chemical cures developed by the same system that rendered your body and spirit so sick? Could plant medicine be the fastest way to create a new cadre of people healthy and connected enough to nature to rethink capitalism? Could it be a crucial factor in the birth of a new paradigm? Could such an awakening, given the perils we now face as a species, ever be more urgent or important?
I have devoted seven years working with plant medicine, both for my personal development and in recent years as a photographer chronicling people’s relationship with it.
I feel that this is perhaps my most important work yet, both personally and professionally. It is highly autobiographical, and goes to the core of our common humanity and our current predicament.
Taking these photographs is painstaking work: many of these substances are illegal in many countries, and the ceremonies are by their nature deeply exposing. It takes courage for participants to agree to be photographed at a moment of such immense vulnerability. I too always ingest the medicine when I’m photographing, letting the plant spirits guide me through the ceremonial space. I’m never just a passive observer of happenings.
I use a single candle flame to light my portraits of participants plumbing the depths of hell or vaulting through the heavens in their visions. The deep contrasts between light and shade the candlelight creates within these pitch-black ceremonies is a conscious echo of Caravaggio and Da Vinci’s paintings of the divine.
These portraits interweave with landscapes of the British wilds which I’ve shot while immersed in nature to process ceremonies and my thoughts on life. Some are deliberately unsettling, others, harmonious: reflecting the trajectory of healing—from suffering, to tranquillity. In this, they have continuity with the Romantics’ landscape photography, who were similarly preoccupied with notions of the sublime, the divine, and nature’s ability to heal.
These nature photographs in my work also stand to remind us that we are minnows compared to the forces of deep time: these wilds pre-date us and will outlast the short spans of our little human lives.
