When I am having a nightmare, my unwelcome dreamscape usually involves familiar people and situations, where things occur in a strange logic and stream of events that never actually happened in real life, but makes acute emotional sense upon waking. For individuals to whom real and persistent trauma or abuse have occurred, I've been told that their nightmares are actually the stuff of a remembered reality: a continual re-staging of abusive power dynamics, senseless and horrible events, and a crude feeling of emptying out that is realized when the dream has ended.

4024 Locke Ave, from the series Exposure in Vivo by Selena Salfen

The work of Selena Salfen is both the stuff of art and art therapy, for the story she is compelled to tell and work through is that of a trauma suffered by three generations of her family, and by telling it and re-orienting the past, she hopes to purge its menacing hold and power on those still around to feel its grip. From her spare and haunting artist's statement:

My grandfather has been a consistently frightening figure in my family. He returned severely damaged from his nine months as a starved and violently interrogated German prisoner of war in World War II. Functioning through the remnants of his untreated traumatic experiences, he raised a family in a physically and psychologically abusive household, governed by his alcoholism and nonsensical rules. He worked as a mortician, stealing from those he embalmed and bringing a desensitized relationship with death home to his six children. This traumatic environment cultivated self-destruction and dysfunction amongst the children, leading to suicide, addiction, and many life-long struggles. The legacy of my grandfather's experience in war and resultant abuse of his family has mutated and transmitted itself through three generations. For this project, I use the camera to disrupt the pattern of silence that has guarded our family's dysfunction, while reconnecting the family and redefining their experience within my grandfather's environment.

Extracting the Gold (from the Teeth), from the series Exposure in Vivo by Selena Salfen

The Punishment Buzzcut, from the series Exposure in Vivo by Selena Salfen

Putting the Cat Down, from the series Exposure in Vivo by Selena Salfen

How does you begin healing from a bogeyman that's still around? How do you begin to tell the past so that in the re-telling, you don't actually re-live its potent and toxic emotions as well? How to let go of the past; or maybe more precisely how to lessen its effects on the present? Salfen goes on to describe the psychological underpinnings to her artistic practice for this series:

To make this body of work, I flew members of my family back from their scattered locations to the house in Missouri where my grandfather still lives. This process mimics the treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, referred to exposure in vivo, in which subjects are directed to return to the physical location of a trauma and confront their fears in order to heal. The photographs I make in these locations are reconstructions of stories from the past, as well as observations of each descendant's reimmersion into this historically traumatic location. In addition, I excavate the space, searching for evidence of past and present dysfunction amongst my grandfather's neglected animals, rotting food, and sixty years of hoarding.

The images from Selena Salfen's Exposure in Vivo project stun and confuse me, and leave me with the feeling that I have witnessed something powerful. Sifting through the series on her website, going through the narrative once, twice, several times in a hypnotic, compulsive repetition, I feel as if I have been experiencing a tilted, muted dream life of someone's waking nightmare. Would these images seem menacing without the backstory? I believe they would, if taken in their careful sequencing that Salfen demonstrates on her site. Can they bring any peace or closure or better coping to the actual family members affected and depicted in them? I sure hope so.

Images from this series are currently on view at the The Camera Club of New York, where Salfen received second place in their national photography competition, alongside 2008 Hot Shot Juliane Eirich.

Salfen's entire series Exposure in Vivo is viewable on her website.