Tilley_01
Tilley_04

Adrenaline, explains writer Jordan Kushins in Issue 19 of Kinfolk Magazine, settles in not while we find ourselves in the midst of crisis but the moment beforehand; it’s the anticipation, not the actual event that gives us a chemical high.

To illustrate this phenomenon, London-based photographer Aaron Tilley teamed up with set designer Kyle Bean to create In Anxious Anticipation, a series of images meant to induce our bodies into mimicking a primitive and instinctual flight, fight, or freeze response.

Rather than pursuing the obvious images associated with the anxiety hormone, Tilley chose to translate the effects of adrenaline in pristine still lifes. The word “still life” itself might not in fact be accurate in describing these pictures, in which inanimate objects are frozen precariously in the exact moment before some horrible and irrevocable event.

It’s in these mundane items that Tilley and Bean discover true terror in the shape of a stain, a pop, or got forbid, a mess, proving that both the discomfort and delight incensed by our adrenal glands can be found not only in the extreme but also in the banal.

Tilley_02
Tilley_05
Tilley_03
Tilley_06

All images © Aaron Tilley and Kyle Bean for Kinfolk Magazine

Read this next: Picture Anxiety Through the Lens of Five Photographers