I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember, and I’ve tried everything from medication to dietary changes to shake the issues. In 2017 my therapist suggested that I had survived an abusive childhood but I laughed it off, listing a number of pleasant memories as a counter argument. However, in the years that followed, the more I read about trauma and how the body writes that terror to our DNA, I began to accept the truth and reframe my history.
One of the first things I did once I accepted my new reality was to start a new series exploring trauma. I invited survivors of trauma to share their story with me and then make a related portrait. I had subjects bring with them a number of photos that represented the traumatic event in their life, which I put into a slideshow and projected onto them. As each image washed over them I clicked the shutter, making a multiple exposure. As the images representing terror layered up they blending together, losing definition and leaving behind only colors and shapes. Ugliness turned into something beautiful, the past and present now integrated.
So it was with this collaboration with @sarahannewu—an amazing photographer who has worked through a traumatic past. We started off the session by making trauma portraits but decided to also make some more lighthearted, fashion-focused images (though I decided to keep with the projected-self theme). I shot tethered to my laptop, which was tethered to my projector, so that every photo I took of her would import and project onto her. As she moved between poses it dictated where her projected past self fell onto her “current” self. Her second-old arm fell on her face. Her fraction-of-a-second older face fell onto her forehead.
I was reminded of a line in the Son Lux song, “Aquatic” that goes “You won’t find me where I fall.” At a cellular level we are never not changing and a never wholly one thing. This is a comforting thought to someone like me who tends to label everything in black and white terms such as “good” or “bad” or “successful” or “failure”. While traumatic pasts can’t be changed they can certainly be reframed to make something beautiful.
