Photography as a Medium for Self-Awareness
Today I am writing about something difficult for me. Something that unfortunately affects a lot of people all over the world and that has been ignored and ridiculed throughout societies but, luckily, nowadays it is starting to be recognized and normalized so all of us who suffer it can improve our lives. I am talking about mental health, more specifically chronic depression. I am not a psychologist, so I will not give advice or solutions. I am going to tell you about my personal experience and how I decided to turn my camera towards myself and how I used photography to understand myself, face my situation and emotional responses, and document my progress in order to help myself and hopefully inspire others to employ photography as a tool to fight our inner demons.
Not only have I used photography to express my body dysmorphia and the consequences the lack of self-love and the issues with my self-image have brought me throughout my adult life in my new photobook Bodily Confessions, but I also wanted to use photography as my witness during my psychological therapy with another self-portraits project titled Insomnia.
It all started a few years ago when I was still living in Denmark, even though I later discovered, or acknowledged, that it had been there for as long as 15 years. I started to look at myself with disgust, avoiding staring at my own reflection, hiding my thoughts from others while they slowly ate me from the inside, eventually turning disgust into hate. It was then when I decided to research objectification and the beauty standards for women through a feminist lens for my bachelor project, using my own experience as the main subject. I discovered I was not alone, that we are unconsciously trained to diminish ourselves, our values, and our bodies to become submissive to the patriarchal and capitalist powers. I had to continue in order to understand how I could hate my body and myself so much, reflecting on my past and my own subjectivity towards body image, how it all started. I took my Polaroid camera and pointed it towards my own body, forcing myself to look at it and to face myself. This was the first time I ever gathered the courage to do something like that, to be completely honest with myself mentally and physically and to be willing to expose it all, image and text, into a photobook available for everyone to see, Bodily Confessions.
But that was just the beginning of my fall into the darkness. I opened the door of consciousness and self-awareness through my photography project to start a difficult journey, the realization of my own condition and a depression I had carried with me for over 15 years. But I knew I couldn’t go back to ignore it anymore. I got it out of me, a visual representation of my subjectivity in the shape of black and white polaroids. It was time to face myself and everything that had brought me to that point. So, once again, I took my camera and shot Insomnia.
Insomnia is a photography project which includes twenty self-portraits in black and white shot employing a pinhole lens. With this project, I decided to turn the camera towards me in order to represent my personal experience with depression, how it developed and evolved from my own subjective position. The photographs follow the narrative thread of the psychological experience with myself, from the depths of a hole from which I did not know how to escape until my own liberation, accepting myself in a new light. Each photograph intends to communicate the thoughts, sensations, and feelings I experienced towards myself during a long process of reflection about the depression I suffered and my progress within this personal fight against my inner demons. My artistic intention in the conceptualization and realization of Insomnia consisted in visualizing, from my own subjective experience, the different states I had to navigate during my depression, making the spectator conscious of my emotional self, looking for empathy with those people who do not know how to distinguish nor react to this mental illness, and also with those who suffer it.
Before I turned the camera towards myself, I used it to document others. Strangers in the streets of cities I lived in or visited, imagining lives and situations that I might be secretly seeking for myself, always in denial. I love street photography, but I realized I was neglecting my life and my story to showcase others’. And since that decision was made, I have been able to see myself in a different light. Photography has saved me from myself, from a darkness that had dominated my life for as long as I can remember. I don’t know if I would feel this improvement in my self-image without these two projects. I don’t even know if I would have started therapy without the self-awareness brought by Bodily Confessions.
Photography is my main artistic medium of aesthetic expression, and I felt I had to speak out about my own experience through art, this time in the shape of self-portrait photography. Portraiture is probably the main type of artistic expression throughout art history, from painting to sculpture, and artists have been portraying themselves in their artworks for centuries. Now, we use self-portraits to tell an intimate story, to express our own subjectivity, to raise awareness on an important topic that can help others heal or think about their own situations. I have said it before, but I believe the role of art, and hence photography, should be to voice the social issues and concerns of people in our society to improve ourselves, whether creating fictional settings or using personal experiences that can relate to others.
Photography, like any other art form, has the power of healing. We just need to be open and sincere to ourselves and embrace photography as an art medium of expression and self-awareness that can help us see the light. I have complemented my self-portraits with essay writing because I am still too shy for TikTok videos. But I can finally say I am proud of myself for having the courage to get in front of my camera to shoot my vulnerabilities and share them with the world, learning in the difficult journey of depression to listen to myself and to value my mind and my body for the wonderful things I can do.
“It’s not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter”
