Confronting a primal beast tightens the breath. This sensation, often experienced in the presence of serpents, is referred to as zero at the bone.
Emily Dickinson wrote of this specific brand of fear in her poem “A narrow Fellow in the Grass”, alluding to it as both a danger within nature and an acute encounter with nothingness. The language itself summons up a sense of proprioceptive constriction and qualities of the primal, as if feeling itself could penetrate our bodies and tremble their marrow. These pictures of nocturnal animals and their environments, do not reference a single or flattened narrative of exploit or dread. Instead they trade in the world of feeling, symbolism, and the haptic: red, vibratory moons hover in fields of blackness, twisting bodies pass through the steadied frame, sky and water merge, or are mistaken for one another. Reptilian ancestors bridge the rift between the infinite cosmos and the temporal earthbound, mirroring our common evolutionary origins and precarious symbiotic co-existence. The roles of predator and prey become entangled, and dissolved into one another; glinting eyes watch us back. Here, the darkness, co-occupied by cold-blooded, highly adaptive animals, is felt in its fullness: as the beguiling, the bottomless, the forbidding, the sublime.
Carmen Winant, 2017
Balarama Heller’s project Zero at The Bone presents an eerie view of primordial, reptilian life in the Everglades. An oft-documented area, Heller’s project is altogether unique: choosing to shoot in the darkness of night, when the outline of the familiar is dimmed, Heller draws on “symbolism and the haptic” to present the relationship between predator and prey as nebulous. Under a pink moonlight and between silky spider webs, the photographs oscillate between the real and the imaginary.
Siobhán Bohnacker
Senior Photo Editor
The New Yorker
Balarama Heller (b. 1979, New York)
Balarama Heller lives and works in New York City. His practice reimagines archetypal symbols found in the natural world. He explores primal symbols and patterns, both real and imagined, working towards a visual language of preverbal awareness. These symbols interact in a ceaseless cycle of creation and destruction, referencing the cosmological, mythological and atomic scales.
Heller lived in Istanbul, photographing long-form projects concerning ritual and transcendence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Heller resettled in New York City in 2010. Recent group shows include Maelstrom, at 303 Gallery, New York, You Can’t Win, Jack Black’s America curated by Randy Kennedy at Fortnight Institute, What’s Outside the Window at ReadingRoom, Melbourne AU, New Artists at Red Hook Labs and the 2015 Aperture Summer Open. In 2014, he published his first artist book, Into and Through. Zero at the Bone received first place at the 2017 Center Awards Editor’s Choice and runner-up for the 2017 Aperture Portfolio Prize. His 2019 project Sacred Place” was featured in Aperture Magazine issue 241, with text by Pico Iyer.
