A Different Lens: Photography By Dr. Klafter

My grandfather was an optometrist and used a camera to teach me, as a little boy, how the eye refracts light through the lens and projects images onto the retina. Even now, I find myself thinking about the workings of vision whenever I see light behaving in beautiful or surprising ways. My father—himself a gifted and inventive photographer—later taught me the craft on his Nikkormat 35mm. Photography, for me, is a way of playing with light in order to discover beauty and complexity that are not immediately apparent.

I think that my photography is very connected to my work as a psychoanalyst. Listening analytically, allowing impressions to accumulate, and gradually shaping them into a formulation that can be useful to patients or supervisees feels very much like going on a photo shoot: taking everything in, noticing what draws the eye, looking at everything form multiple angles, and then processing the image so that its depth and complexity can be more easily seen.