LAUREN THOMPSON

PHOTOPLASM / THE INVISIBLE HOTEL

 

manifesto​​

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A photographic methodology that reclaims long exposure as a site of movement, rhythm, and release.​

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The Invisible Hotel is not a building but a field - an invisible architecture that surrounds the self: psychic, corporeal, and temporal. It names the internal space I move through while the camera’s shutter remains open. During the long exposure, I inhabit this architecture, while the camera stays outside, recording what seeps into visibility.

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Photography has historically functioned as a technology of immobilisation. In its earliest form, long exposure demanded stillness: bodies were clamped, posed, and held in place so they could be made legible. The subject was required to perform immobility in order to appear truthful. Before photography could freeze time, it made people freeze.​​​

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Photoplasm inverts this history.​​

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In my practice, long exposure is no longer a mechanism of restraint but a field of release. The body is not disciplined into stillness; it is allowed to move, tremble, and unfold through time. Rhythm replaces pose. Duration replaces the instant. What is recorded is not a frozen likeness, but a trace shaped by movement, sensation, memory, and the discharge of trapped energy.

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The Invisible Hotel is organised into rooms that correspond to distinct internal processes and photographic behaviours:​

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• Kitchen - mind–body reintegration​

• Piano Bar - nervous system regulation

• Boiler Room -  shadow integration

• Luggage Room  - memory resonance

• Ballroom - relational and external resonance​​

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What flows between these rooms and seeps into the corridors is plasm - an invisible substance in constant flux. When plasm is traced by light over time, it leaves a residue.

 

This is Photoplasm:

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light + matter + duration + invisible ingredient.

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Photoplasm is not a visual effect, a manipulation, or a distortion of the body. It is a material trace of internal passage - a photographic record of embodied feeling, rhythm, and psychic residue made visible through time.

 

The body is not the subject of the image; it is the apparatus through which the image emerges.​ Each exposure opens a threshold. A self surfaces, releases what it carries, leaves its trace, and dissolves. What remains is not a stable identity but evidence of becoming - a photograph that does not imprison the body in a moment, but allows it to move.