Suicide By Stephanie Guttenplan Analysis

She told me at age seven it was her mother’s mother who left this world. At age eleven, it was her grandmother and best friend who passed in her arms. When she was twelve, her grandfather died and her mother broke. At fourteen, she gave up and said “fuck it.” “I thought, and still sometimes think, that death follows me around,” explained Stephanie Rachel Guttenplan.
Guttenplan is a surrealist photographer, based out of New York, who continues to experiment with different uses of a variety of medium. The majority of her work is shaped heavily by her life experiences growing up in the south and her experiences with death. Guttenplan was a quiet, reserved child. She described herself as “a very dark kid, depressed, mute and wanted nothing …show more content…
“I was fine with it,” she recalls. “I didn’t think I would live past the age of 27 - thought I would be one of the cool kids.” But her partner at the time didn’t agree with her choices. Guttenplan ended the relationship. She tells me, she was under the impression that she would graduate and come back to him. But all that came back was his suicide letter. She came to terms with the need to be sober. But with sobriety came mind chatter. “Mind chatter is me facing me.” She explains, “this was the first time I could feel anything authentically.” In June of 2013, she published a book with this as the central idea. Mind Chatter is a compilation of poetry and photography that encapsulates her internal monologue. She tells me that now, “intangible has shifted.” Three years later, it has a bit of a different meaning, as she has explored more and more of the world around her. But she still focuses on the energy in the air and the relationships and interactions of the things around her. “Intangible is my ego and my heart layered on a moment - to create the friction in my body to how it wants to respond or react,” she …show more content…
“It’s as if the universe is going on about itself, and we disrupt it with our messy hearts.” Guttenplan distorts her work in a way that reflects what we are doing in our own minds – letting emotions interfere with the purity of reality. She described to me how she begins with writing. From there a playlist of music is derived. She fills sketchbooks with everything that is floating around inside her. She digs through everything she has collected and spilled out into the open to discover what inside her the inspiration is stemming from, what pent up emotion or event in her life. She will begin to photograph herself or a muse to the sounds she’s collected – the written piece that she created and the playlist she put together. She, and occasionally her muse, will dance through the space, exploring how their bodies fit into the