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A month ago, Jen and I were asked to participate in an art show based on love letters that had been written in the 1950s. The curator of the show discovered the letters in an antique dresser and decided share the stories. Fifteen couples were each given a letter to work from, and Jen and I decided to use the heart and the brain to illustrate the conflicting feelings that our letter’s author Lotté was struggling with after separating from her lover.

So last Monday, post-Chinatown, I met Jen and we had a smoke and compared our findings. Her brains were quite a bit more expensive than my hearts, and we decided that I’d buy the beer after the shoot to even out expenses. We set up the studio and Jen bloodied the props with some leftover halloween supplies while I wiggled the camera around and tried to look busy so I could keep my hands clean for as long as possible.

Once we were set up, we tried a few shots, but quickly realized that there was no way we could manage to press the shutter with our hands as bloody and messy as they were, so Jen asked a first-year student that was also in the studio to come press the button for us. We thought she would be grossed out, but she loved it and jumped right in to pour some more blood onto our hands and even asked if she could hold the brain. The brain was almost enjoyable to hold in your hands. Jen said it was “like kneading cold, wet, bread.”

After shooting, we took the hearts and brains along with the packaging they came in and wrapped them up in construction paper together with some other miscellaneous photo-shoot junk. We taped that up, put it in a plastic bag, tied it up and dropped it all in the garbage can outside. When the police later asked me why I chose that specific garbage can, I told them, “because it was on the way to the car.”