Overall I am happy with the way I decided to portray mental illness throughout my photobook. When I started this project I knew I wanted to tackle the subject of mental health, but it took me a while to figure out the best way to go forward with it. Originally i though of using landscapes as a way to convey emotion, however eventually decided to turn the camera on myself for a set of self-portraits. I feel as though this decision really helped me open up and put as much personal experience into the book as possible. After the original self-portrait shoot, i wanted to continue with creating a really unique and personal narrative in which i can show both my own emotions and feelings that i have been through, but leave parts of it ambiguous enough to be interpreted by other people in their own way.
I then decided to focus on my personnel experience surrounding prescription anti-depressant drugs, or more specifically SSRIs ( Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors ) which are used when, for whatever reason, there is a lack of serotonin being produced, with it’s aim to boost serotonin levels in the brain. This element was quite difficult to capture, as most of the time you don’t notice anything different, which is why i decided to use a gradual build in saturation inside the book to show the slow but steady changes, however I did want to make sure to capture aspects of medication not working, and the task of changing medications and gradually building back up until it works. I represented this component in my book by showing the rise in dosage levels in text at the bottom of the page.
The contrast between emotions felt and the way medication can affect these emotions is shown using different colors, but ultimately ending with more desaturated images to show that there is never a definitive end to some of the ways that mental illness can affect someones life. I wanted to show how medication can make the world seem better at the time, but ultimately cant completely change your outlook on how you feel. To do this i used brightly coloured backgrounds combined with the bright colours of the pills themselves, which also had the effect of contrasting some of the much darker images I had already made from previous shoots.
Over the course of the 3 studio photoshoots and various smaller shoots done around nature, people and extreme close ups of my hands, arms face, etc. I decided to use colour and brightness in order to show emotions in the narrative, with images being brighter and more highly saturated when showing the effects of the medication, and then darker images with low key lighting to show the change in mood