Girl with the Gas Mask
Staged photography
DESLIZA ↓When I was around five years old, I began to have recurring visions of a family wearing gas masks. This image would appear specifically whenever I looked toward my family's house down the hallway. The vision of the gas m
Staged photography —
When I was 23, I decided to transform this haunting image into a staged photograph. After finding the models for the shoot, there was no doubt in my mind that I would give them a happy ending. I had lived for too long with the suffocating presence of this heavy-masked family and all the sorrow attached to them. The turning point came when I created and photographed The Gas Mask Girl (2012) — the image shown above. In photographing the girl wearing the gas mask, I borrowed her presence to help me process and purge the emotional weight carried by those visions.
The experience was liberating. It felt as though I had finally removed the filter of my own imaginary gas mask and could breathe freely. I allowed myself to be "contaminated" by this staged girl — and through her, I stepped into a new phase of life, even though the chaos around me remained. That photograph definitively freed me from the ghostly visions of the gas mask family.
I believe that transforming my vision into an object — in this case, a photograph — enabled me to reprocess my past experience and the pain attached to it. Eloa, the girl who posed for the image, became a mirror of myself: she was about the same age I had been when the visions first began. I wanted Eloa to know how important she was in my life, because she offered her presence and seriousness so that together, we could complete this act of catharsis.
Girl with the Gas Mask
