Photography: Despair
joeann hart
In psychology, contagion is the spreading of an emotional or mental state. On the eve of the pandemic I was already struggling with profound losses in my life, so when the world shut down in fear and isolation it felt as if it was reflecting my own fragility. Too shattered to document my experience with the written word, I used self-portraiture as a means to grapple with both mortality and identity. By learning to explore my emotions through visual narrative, I discovered I was no longer the person I had been. I existed in a liminal space where beauty competed with brokenness and despair. The resulting images record this period of transformation. In this particular photo, Despair, I stand before a clothesline airing curtains of the dead.