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The Power of Photography a therapeutic journey
The Power of PhotographyA Therapeutic Journey
The over-arching aim of my Masters Photography has been to ‘harness’ some of the innate peculiarities of the photograph. This final written work will cover why I have used photography as a therapy. It will describe how the camera, photograph and therapist can become part of a defining gaze. The essay will detail my personal therapeutic journey with photography, along with my evolving methodology for a clinical Phototherapy practice. The dissertation will also refer to artists that have influenced me, Barbara Kruger, Tracey Emin, Sophie Calle and Annette Messager as well as academic and critical theories within both photography and psychology. A question that has surfaced in my enquires many times, is why have I decided to use photography as a form of therapy? Many therapies offer ways in which repressed or unconscious memories and feelings can be acknowledged and worked upon. They do not rely solely on words. Psychodynamic therapy could be described as the ‘talking cure’, hypnotherapy as a ‘dreaming cure’; I would suggest that Phototherapy could be the ‘seeing or visual cure’. But why have I chosen to specialise in photography? Possibly it is the paradoxical nature of the photograph that has intrigued me. A photograph is able to capture a moment, to freeze time, it can be perceived as a container, a reality trap. Photographs can have a particular ability to touch people very deeply. The ontology of the object is lost within the image projected, the physicality of the photograph becomes transparent, its physicality is ephemeral almost intangible. It is not the physical object of the photograph that is important, but the ‘trace’ that is left behind on the viewer according to Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. Balzac in the ‘Theory of Spectres’, was conscious off the trace being understood ‘as the manifest of meaning.’ It is this trace of meaning to the individual that is central to my work undertaken with photography.
To put photography into a contemporary context, images today monopolise contemporary culture; phone camera images, i Pods, PSPs, X-Box, YouTube, Flickr, the cinema, advertising on TV, advertising online, magazines, billboards to name but a few. The consciousness is inundated with images which are more common place in the Westernised world than ever before in history. ‘Along with our parents, the mass media, raised us, socialised us, entertained us, deceived us, disciplined us, told us what we could do and told us what we couldn’t.’ (Douglas, 1984: 13). This familiarity reduces the photographs’ perceived threat. Throughout our lives we store information for later recall, we think in images, which help to make up our mental map, our internal belief system. Most people do not think in strings of words but think, feel and recall memories in imagery and inner silent thought pictures.
How can photography help in a therapeutic situation?
There are four main areas that are essential when using photography as a healing tool, they are the element of play, the ability to distance ones’ self from the image and to project and transfer feelings on to the same image which then becomes a transitional object, lastly an image can uncover hidden depths and raw unconscious emotions. These emotions may not surface immediately, but may come into the conscious mind over a matter of days or weeks. Working with photographs in therapy, can be likened to permitting the adult self to ‘play’; Ed Ruche speaking in 1972, describes photography ‘ It’s a playground, is all it is. Photography’s just a playground for me. I’m not a photographer at all.’ (ed. Douglas Fogle, 2003; p22). On the two day Phototherapy Course at University of Derby, the participants had to look at a photographic image by John Blakemore for 20 minutes, and then we were asked to re-create the image and our feelings to it using art materials (Image 1). At the end of the exercise we discussed in groups, the myriad of feelings and associations that arose from a single picture. It is my belief that this exercise emphasised that ‘playing’ with images can help inner feelings for the individual to become ‘visible’, to come into conscious awareness. As adults, it seems, we can lose the ability to play, yet the mechanisms and need for self knowledge and self exploration can remain potent. Through photography we can reconnect with play. Playing allows a child to externalise the inner workings of her mind. She can play out fragments of her experiences which become transformed under her control. The ‘power’ of the photograph in therapy can be seen in a myriad of ways, perhaps one of the most important aspects is that the viewer can distance herself from what is being viewed, the depicted person can be seen as an object which helps to allow the viewer some ‘distance’ to self reflect (image 2); power dynamics within the family can be visually seen; they can provide an unfiltered ‘raw’ contact with the unconscious mind. It is image 2 that has become central to my own self reflection, my ‘projections’ on to the ‘toddler’ Kim is that she is enjoying playing, still had a sense of freedom; but in the background there is my Mother, looking to me anxious, controlling, over-protective. Another great ‘strength’ in using photography as a therapy is that they can be used as Winnicotts’ ‘transitional object’, (instead of a blanket or cuddly toy). The physicality of the photograph enables the individual to ‘hold’ on to the object. The photograph can become the object onto which feelings, emotions and associations are ‘transferred’ or ‘projected’ an effect from the past is bought live into the present. This intense form of relating can effectively mobilise an affect to transform patters on the inner world. It is believed by D.A. Krauss (among others) that art and photography can create a direct link to the unconscious (‘Reality, Photography and Psychotherapy, 1983). As soon as a client articulates a problem he puts his own mental filters on his words, but with art and photography, emotions can be ‘seen’ or articulated in their true, ‘raw’ state. Clients’ reactions to postcards, magazine pictures, and snapshots taken by others can provide illuminating clues to their own inner life and repressed memories. Some of these repressed emotions are so painful they can be difficult to articulate and by using photography and re-working old and new images the client may be able to gain access to these emotions.
What is therapeutic photography and phototherapy?
Therapeutic photography is when an individual uses photography as a means of self analysing and self reflection. The term therapeutic photography can become ‘interchanged with the term ‘Phototherapy’, although the two methods are very different. In North America, Judy Weiser has coined the term Phototherapy, which is photography being used as a ‘healing tool’ within the paradigms of a trained counsellor/client relationship. At the same time that Weiser was creating (and naming) a system of photography in therapy in the mid 1980’s, Jo Spence was working in the UK on similar lines. Both systems of phototherapy support an individual to short-circuit inadequate verbal controls. Some repressed emotions are so painful they can be difficult to articulate and by using photography and re-working old and new images it is hoped the client would be able to gain access to these emotions. Ideally as once these emotions are ‘out in the open’ the client or individual can embark upon analysing them.
A Personal Therapeutic Journey
I had specific, clear goals at the beginning of the MA course, to use photography in a clinical setting with myself as a Phototherapist. My ambition was to facilitate other peoples healing through photography and counselling. I did not consciously perceive that I wanted to be an ‘artist’. Within weeks of beginning the MA, I began to flounder and doubt myself and my direction. I became ‘weighed down’ with the influences and academic knowledge that I was gaining through my hypnotherapy and counselling course. It became very difficult to disentangle my thinking and creativity from the ‘Counsellor Kim’. Imperceptibly, the use of therapeutic photography began to become key to my work as a photographer on the Masters course. During the first two or three Units I was unable to understand or articulate this direction and the importance that photography would have as a self-healing tool. I could not explain my direction to myself, my peers or my lecturers. I tended to work intuitively, with no defined ‘path’. With the first collection of images related to me looking back to my past (Image 3). I somehow wanted to re-enact an old photograph of myself as a bridesmaid in my grandparent’s church and around the graveyard ‘attached’ to their house. I photographed my daughter in the dress that I wore at the same age. I encouraged her to enact where I stood in the church and to run around the graveyard as I had as a child. Possibly I was using her as a projection of my own childhood feelings. I used a digital Canon 300D. In addition I purchased a camera that was similar to my first-ever camera, a Polaroid Instamatic. The images brought up associations for me of how I have been ‘sidelined’ by my father and his family. It re-engaged my feelings of hurt and rejection. These images as a therapeutic self-healing tool were a starting point, possibly a ‘transitional object’ for me to reflect and self analyse. Unfortunately, as a photographic project, the images did not portray my psychic pain or despair. I was ‘criticised’ that the images did not have any way of referencing the fact that it was an old dress of mine, or that it was my grandparent’s house and graves within the images. The images were too illustrative...I was bewildered, stumped. As a therapeutic exercise it had begun to open up associations and memories. But as a photographic exercise it failed. Was I pushing the boundaries of a Photography MA too far, should I have been on an Art Therapy course?
Any sense of creativity dissipated, my ideas were unravelling, I was ‘lost’. I ‘hid’ behind the academic work for Unit One and presented at end of that Unit on Barbara Kruger and the way she analyses power flows within society. At the Interim Show in February 2008, I was ‘forced’ to show work. I could not even face seeing my work displayed or hear a ‘crit’ of it. I was feeling overwhelmed. The resulting trilogy of images of my husband, step-father and brother – ‘Homage to Gillian Wearing’, (Images 4, 5, 6), were a crude attempt to access what my subject was thinking, to somehow make visible some of their thought process. Again it seemed a dead-end, I felt ashamed of these images, no-way worthy of a photography student. With hindsight, these images could possibly be viewed in different ways. The fact that my father is not part of this group is significant. I have since begun to question the fact that all three figures are significant male family members. Could these images reflect upon my feelings of self and self-worth? The idea of the projective gaze in the context of these male figures, eventually bought to mind the words of John Berger, (‘Ways of Seeing’, p 46),
‘She has to survey everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance to what is normally thought of as the success of her life... Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves’.
Could these men have helped to define fragments of my shifting self-identity? Could it be these gazes helped to create micro power flows in family? The artist Barbara Kruger’s work had intrigued me, her images and video ‘Twelve’ (images 7 & 8), gave further insight into allowing me to understand some of the power and control flowing in my own family. Kruger’s work reflects that of Michel Foucault, in ‘The History of Sexuality’, that power is everywhere and power flows continually with power struggles occurring all time and manifest themselves in all kinds of relations, including economic processes, knowledge relations, personal relationships and sexual relations.
‘...for power and its politics and hierarchies exist everywhere; in every conversation we have, in every deal we make...I try to address this power and how it choreographs the issues of violence and control, of wealth, poverty, of hope of abjection.’ (Kruger, 2005)
I still questioned how could I portray some of these intangible emotions in my photographic work? How could I depict these power flows in relationships? Barbara Kruger used text to give ‘voice’ to her concepts. Perhaps text or a diary of my own feelings would need to be part of any photographic work. Eventually the words to the poem by Philip Larkin, ‘This be the Verse’ (Appendix 1) seemed to paraphrase some of my feelings ‘They fuck you up your Mum and Dad, they may not mean to but they do’. I did not have the courage to find my voice to write my own ‘text’, I was mute but perhaps by taking on someone else’s words I planned to discover if I could begin to vocalise my own feelings, to portray my inner turmoil. I started to work on the poem, by photographing it being written. I used a pin-hole camera (image 9), and then moved on to filming the writing. None of these trials had the emotional ‘force’ I wanted them to have. I worked in collaboration with a fellow student and filmed myself saying the words, with the emphasis on the mouth. The digital Sony Handcam was used, DCR-SR32. My children were then filmed saying the poem. As I was working on this project I became more aware of my own ‘lack’ as a parent, what had I ‘mirrored’ to my own children, what mental hang-ups had I given them? I wanted to include another generation within the work and struggled to come to terms with the fact that I would have to ask my Mother. I delayed the filming as long as I could. I did not want to confront her. When I did ‘shoot’ the video, it did not bring up our relationship as I had feared, but her relationship with her own mother, who had died traumatically and suddenly when I was ten months old. This buried trauma keeps resurfacing for Mum; it appears that she has not been able to deal with such a tragedy. I worked intuitively on the fragments of memory relating to my own grandmother, (images 10, 11), but is only recently that Mum has started to articulate her own feelings to her loss. It has begun to appear that my grandmothers’ death has shaped my Mothers’ adult life which in turn has shaped mine.
During the work on the ‘Attachment’ video, I revisited the work of by differing theoretians including Lacan, Winnicott and Foucault that there are various ‘gazes’ which help to control, objectify, define and mirror identities to the individual. I was questioning could Larkin’s poem (‘This Be The Verse’), express this idea of passing behaviour, fear and anxieties through to the next generations? Perhaps Larkin is not just describing how parents can affect you by the ‘words they say’ but possibly could ‘They fill you with the thoughts they had and add some extra just for you’. Perhaps these ‘thoughts’ in the poem do not relate to just words from our parents but also their ‘critical mirroring gazes’ that can help to create an inner belief system and the ‘internalised parent’ or’ superego’. To deepen my understanding of the ‘superego’ I began to re-examine the relationship Jo Spence had with her own Mother which seem to parallel my own relationship to my Mother, both these relationships could be viewed and understood through the work of the psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein which helped me to deepen my understanding of the development of the superego. Klein, whose work developed and extended Freud’s studies, found that the development of the individual’s relationship to their parent’s begins as a baby. As the child grows, if their needs are not satisfactorily met, or if the mother ‘projects’ their insecurities onto their child these feelings become internalised within the subconcious mind. If patterns of behaviour are repeated, these feelings, according to Klein, can be seen as affecting the internalised ‘superego’ or otherwise known as the ‘internalised parent’. Each superego
‘develops out of his relationships – in fantasy and in reality – with his parents and other significant figures in his life, and is a reflection of these. And each person’s relationship to his superego will also have an effect on his new relationships with other people in his life, as well as his feelings about, and image of, himself’. (Roth, 2001: p71).
As the work continued on my ‘Attachment’ the relationship role with my Mother became more and more central to the work. I found inspiration and an affinity with Alice Miller, Art therapist, Psychotherapist and artist. Miller chose the medium of paint to work through her to inner-most repressed feelings; I had chosen photography as my medium. It seemed that the poem gave me and my ‘inner child’ or subconcious, a voice that Millers’ work with paint and colour gave her. Through her art and the use of colour, Miller found that there was something beginning to emerge from her paintings, which was an understanding for her ‘inner child’ who wanted to tell her story. What emerged through her art was an unfamiliar world of her early childhood (image 12). The results were a complete surprise, to Miller, in ‘Pictures of Childhood’ (1995) her mother was a brilliant pedagogue, she succeeded perfectly in crushing Miller’s true feelings and needs in such an imperceptible way that no one noticed. This resonated with me, as through the associations I was beginning to make my Mother as primary care giver would have affected me and mirrored feelings of control. She was emotionally very fragile, probably depressed at times, and I became a considerate, understanding daughter. I imperceptibly grew into a projection of what my Mother wanted as an ‘idealised daughter’. My needs I am starting to discover, as well as my voice and creativity were quite possibly and imperceptibly ‘quashed’.
The ‘Attachment’ video started to give me a ‘voice’, possibly the beginning of a direction, a new faith in my creativity. Aesthetically the video did not contain my father and the poem refers to. I ‘toyed’ with the idea of adding my father to the ‘Attachment’ work, but really could not bring myself to do it. The work centred on my relationship with my Mother, but perhaps more importantly my father was absent a great deal through my childhood, and possibly it is his absence that has ‘fucked me up’. The method to create the ‘Attachment’ video was relatively simple, although I doubted my own abilities. Raw files were reworked in Final Cut Pro, and with a two day workshop in this programme helped to make a professional quality film. Upon showing the work to the lecturers, it was suggested that my work should be shown on either three or five screens (Image 13). By having the work showing in a continuous loop, but synched at different times, added to the fact that it symbolised the ‘inner voice’ or critical superego voice in my own head. The merging of words and images was crucial for me to portray how we are affected by power flow in the family and allude to the creation of the superego.
My relative lack of technical knowledge seemed hamper my photography and limit my ideas. To support my creative endeavours, during July 2008 to June 2009, I renewed my determination to gain more insight into the technicalities of photography. I worked with Medium Format and developed my knowledge of digital work on Photoshop, Final Cut Pro. In addition to this, I worked in Black and White and colour processing as well as attended his series of workshops on making and using pinhole cameras. The work with Ori Gersht on Lighting, Colour Processing also developed my basic knowledge. Unfortunately, it did underline to me just how much technical knowledge is required to be a competent photographer. I did find that the ‘simple’ pinhole cameras allowed me the freedom and simplicity in my work. I used the pinhole cameras to re-visit my father’s home and nearby woods. Creatively, I was aiming to re-connect with a recurring dream that I had as a child, before my parents’ divorce (Image 14). The dream-like quality of the pinhole was quite pleasing, almost child-like and playful in making these images. I spent a great deal of time researching and assessing ways to bring hypnotherapy into my creative work, but this at the moment seems to have led to a ‘dead-end’.
Throughout the first year of my MA, I kept questioning myself, why I was doing both the Photography as well as the Counselling course. The work load was quite overwhelming doing, but I firmly believed that one informed the other. Throughout the Photography MA, I felt a compulsion to continue, to access something deep within my psyche. By February 2009 I had reached a physical and mental breaking point. I took the decision to stop my Counselling after diploma level to allow myself to concentrate upon photography. I hoped that by giving myself some space from researching and writing 2,500 words on a monthly basis for my Counselling diploma may help to re-ignite my creativity levels. At this point I really still did not perceive myself as an artist, but purely a Counsellor integrating phototherapy into her practise. The presentation I gave to the Internal Verifier, Angad Kaur, and her words about my work precipitated a complete sea-change in how I viewed myself as a practitioner. I slowly acknowledged that I may begin to define myself as an artist.
I considered that many artists articulate their inner pain through their creative work. Perhaps I did not need to confine myself to being a Phototherapist. Alice Miller, in ‘Thou Shalt Not be Aware’ (1998), develops her ideas about creativity, where she states that traumatic experiences which occur in early childhood and which are later repressed often find expression in the creative works of artists and poets. Tracey Emin, has become very aware of her traumas, and has literally made her life story her art. She has harnessed her raw energy and pain from her past and expressed it as a narrative self exploration in her art work. She is brutally honest about her past most whereas most people want to block painful memories Emin has a way of confronting and foiling them. Her memories are made visible, in her video work, for example ‘Homage to all my dead children’ (Image 15). Her appliquéd blankets are particularly interesting as there appears to be a reference to Winnicotts’ Objects-Relations theory that the blankets (Image 16), in a similar way to the photographs in therapy, act as transitional object that help bridge the gap in the formation of independent selfhood. Emin is reported as saying about these painful feelings that ‘I’m interested in cracking them open and revealing things – like a Pandora’s Box. Every time I do it for myself, I’m left with a lot more freedom afterwards.’ (Emin to Sarah Kent, 1999: p34). The work of Sophie Calle also became influential as a reference to a narrative telling of inner emotion through objects and text.
From this point my final piece of work, developed quickly. A great inspiration was the work of Annette Messager at The Messagers show, Hayward Gallery, 2009. Messagers’ use of dresses, toys and objects enabled me to appropriate some of these ideas (images 17) My personal issue with the ‘Attachment’ video was that my Father had not been in my childhood, it became more and more apparent that I was angry with him which seemed to focus upon the fact that he did not attend my wedding. The wedding day and my dress began to represent, the fact that it was my mothers’ projections and expectations of me to be the ‘idealised’ virginal daughter married into a ‘good’ family. It was her ambition for me to be married and become a housewife. The dress also became a symbolic site of contention as the point at which my husband and his family began to have a powerful influence over me as I began imperceptibly to reflect their needs, desires and aspirations. To my horror, when I suggested that I use my wedding dress for the final exhibition, I felt concern that it should not become damaged. Just in case my daughter would like to wear it! I was automatically projecting expectations on to her of marriage, of weddings. Was I in turn unconsciously having the same expectations for my daughter that my Mother did for me. The dress has a large train over two metres long, and so I created a chicken wire frame to create an inner garment for the dress. An undergarment was made for the train, with the outside of having flexible rods inserted to give the train a form. Photographs could then be hung from this inner garment. Originally, I had thought to encase or entomb my dress or bridesmaid dresses in a glass case, but this would have been too similar to Annette Messager. After trying various scenarios, I decided to print old images onto acetate. This ‘encouraged’ the work to appear more ethereal, less substantial, just like a trace of memory. These images would then hang down from the dress, and mimic my thoughts and memories and the ‘power flows’ with my family. The works would be hanging from the ceiling with the images at eye level. The images were scanned in and manipulated in Photoshop. The Philip Larkin Poem, for me highlighted the fact that our own parents’ have been ‘fucked up in their turn’, and by looking at the family photographs it is easier to relate to this statement, as I tend to think only of the ‘living’ family that I have met personally, that is my grandparents. Working through the old family albums allowed me to become familiar with those individuals that had parented my grandparents. I had not given thought to how that generation were parented, how their ‘superegos’ would have been affected by their parents. My Mother would have been affected by her parents, and thus my grandparents would have learnt behaviour by being reflected by their parents. This has helped me to intellectualise why my Uncle may act in the emotionally abusive way that he does to his wife and adult children. His father, my grandfather, according to my Mother and Uncle, was quite a cruel man, with a vicious temper. My Uncle is repeating this behaviour and history seems to be repeating itself, the children (my cousins) have disowned their own father.
I wanted a myriad of family images to flow down from my ‘core’, perhaps referencing menstrual blood (image 19). This was important to me, as possibly one of the biggest anxieties, I have, is of my father seemingly rejecting me completely when I was twelve, just starting a new school, just as I started my periods. The fear and anxiety that has been worked through during my own therapy, has possibly revealed that my emotions of rejection can be linked to how ill I felt each time I had a period. The shape of the acrylic could almost represent drops of blood. To achieve the shape I designed it using a CAD programme to cut out using a laser machine. As I have progressed with making the images and putting them onto the acetate, my children have become involved and the work became quite craft-like. For a while it became central to conversation and their understanding of our family. We worked together to tie on the images to the chicken frame dress. Emotional connections were made on many different levels. It was almost like creating a family heirloom or re-creating a family album. My Mother was affected by it and gave her a starting point talk about incidents from her past. One image within the dress is of her Great Grandfather and the uncomfortable feelings she had about him.
Hanging the dress in the studio, has given me further insights and am still reflecting on how it is affecting me. The dress with the video projecting onto the underneath of the train and up the core centre of the skirt has added quite potent sexual overtones. The folds of the dress seem to represent the inner folds of the physical core of my female sexuality. The folds of the dress remind me of the work of Georgia O’Keeffe’s’ flower portraits. I had always intended to the item to be provocative, to encourage a viewer to enter into the inner workings of my memory, my mind, into my inner self, but the installation has a more visceral feel than expected. I had hoped that by entering the skirt of the dress, it would feel like entering Emins’ famous tent ‘Everyone I Ever Slept With.’ Whilst hanging the piece with Bjorn Veno, I began to question that I was allowing and encouraging another man to touch and hold my wedding dress, he was underneath my dress, experiencing it. Viewing the installation from a masculine perspective, the intimacy of the work has created a voyeuristic sense of looking, of scopophilia (Image 20). This called to mind Laura Mulveys’ seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure and The Narrative Cinema’ (1975). ‘Within a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active male and passive female. The determining male gaze projects fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly.’ The association for me felt that I was defiling the intimacy between myself and husband. ‘Hanging the dress’ led to connotations in my mind to re-awaken the fact that when I was 21 I had been through a traumatic sexual experience. I promised myself that I would not have another sexual relationship outside marriage. My poor husband had to wait until our wedding night to ‘consummate’ our union physically. By using my wedding dress I appear to be testing the boundaries and conventions of my emotional, physical and sexual being.
Creating a ‘Phototherapy Practice’
Concurrently with my self- therapeutic work, I have aimed to create a professional ‘Phototherapy’ practise and to establish a ‘methodology’ of using photography within a counselling situation. The greatest influences I have had on my Phototherapy work has been Judy Weiser, Phototherapist, Psychologist, Photographer and Jo Spence, Photographer and Phototherapist. A great deal of the work both women have done is similar, both practices centre of the use of images to create an access to raw and repressed emotions. During the Maters I have become entangled in creating a professionally recognised Phototherapy practise on strict psychotherapeutic grounds, on very similar lines to July Weiser. Certainly the work that I have undertaken with my client’s has been insightful (hopefully), but the ‘balance’ of the sessions has been psychotherapeutic with a little photography. I have recently aimed at evolving further the notion of creativity and play and have re-evaluated Jo Spence’s’ work as an inspiration to develop my clinical methodology. Spence in conjunction with Rosie Martin role-played different ideas of the mother/daughter dynamic. I have incorporated role-play into my methodology, my work is still client led. This development centres more on ‘Lensed Based Therapy’, where as therapist I photograph the client whilst role-playing. The dynamics of the ‘gaze’ of therapist to the client becomes less important as it is the benevolent gaze of the camera with the client that becomes central. The methodology continues to reference that of Winnicotts’ theory of the benevolent gaze where the therapist acts as ‘mother as mirror’. Within my practise, the therapist/gaze of the camera does not attempt to control or objectify, but rather facilitate the meaning and understanding for the client of these fragments of identity mirrored to them. Once the images have been produced, worked through and re-ordered by the client, a gradual transformation and re-connection with feelings that have been buried may surface. It is this second stage where a catharsis may happen. A great deal of reflection often occurs with the client after or between sessions. The third stage of the methodology is the client sharing and discussing the photographs with the therapist where further insights can occur. It is at this stage that the whole process may go through another cycle.
With the development of the importance of ‘Lensed Based Therapy’ and the benevolent gaze of the camera, three clients have chosen to include this dynamic in their therapy sessions and I have become the therapist actively using the camera during role play. All three clients’ controlled their sessions. The first Ms L-M had an initial counselling session and then decided to bring in props and clothes to re-create her feelings and emotional ties with leaving her home of Barbados and coming to live in the UK (Image 21). I created a studio, in accordance to Ms L-Ms’ directions. She bought her old school uniform, as well as clothes that she feels happy wearing in Barbados but not in the UK. As the session progressed, it helped Ms LM to re-experience some quite raw emotions. She said she felt ‘safe’, as she believed she was addressing the camera and not me directly. The second client, Ms S, had feelings of repression, almost of strangulation due to the fact that she had been ‘stalked’ for three years. Although she had won her court case, she said she still had emotional ties and bonds to these events. Again, this client brought in props, and controlled the session by using chains to personify her interior pain her feelings of being controlled and restrained by the invasion of this man on her privacy. A further couple of sessions, led to Ms S asking me to take some images of her expressing her freedom through jumping on a trampoline at her mothers’ home. It was a journey that Ms S undertook, with the photographs mapping her emotional journey, by re-living some of the emotional trauma and working on her sense of freedom, Ms S has begun to alter the perception of her memory through play. Image 22, requires the viewer to Ms S work on ‘freedom’ as a state of self-expression in a therapy session, whereas they could easily be mis-read. With the third client, Mrs Y, I have worked with for over three years on intermittently. We have worked on her feeling regarding the post-operative female body, the trauma of being in hospital for six months, her eating disorders, the pressure that it has put on her marriage and family. The dynamic between the camera and the client was central to the work. Together, we revisited the hospital ward where she had been ill, and I photographed her there. The work developed into studio based work and eventually she asked me to do some work based in her home. In all stages it was the dynamic between client and camera and then client and photographs that were important. Mrs Y required the camera to reflect and mirror her, to help her to begin to come to fragments from her past. Mrs Y very much wanted to exhibit these images visually at The East Kent Stoma Meeting to encourage a discourse with other people who have Stoma bags and who struggle with their self image.
To conclude, my personal journey through this Masters photography has been far-reaching and has taken me on a journey to unexpected depths. I have aimed to develop my Phototherapy practice in as creative a way as possible by using myself as photographer in a ‘Lensed based’ dynamic with the client. The act of viewing and mirroring the client as therapist, and the development of the camera becoming the mirror has grown in importance. The idea of ‘play’ with photography has become important in the work I am undertaking with ‘Home start’ and ‘Surestart’. I hope to continue and define the photography based workshops that I run with these charities. In the near future I aim to apply to the Arts Counsel for funding for this work. I am also analysing the costs of creating my own private studio space to enable my Phototherapy clients to be in as ‘safe’ an environment as possible. The self therapeutic work has encouraged me to make a link to unaccessed, repressed emotions that I have begun to work through and make connections in my conscious mind which has enabled me to begin to find a ‘voice’ to express them. This work has facilitated me reviewing the way power relations in my own family have worked. It has helped me to assess how the superego is formed, but more importantly that it is the ‘chain’ of influences that my parents’ have had on them from their parents and grandparents has been important for me to understand some of the ways in which my parents have acted in the past. The installation of my wedding dress has shown me ‘fragments’ of different selves that have been mirrored to me and I have begun to analysing myself from the perspective of the views, desires and needs of ‘Others’. This emerging composite of the fragmented self cannot be said to be a ‘true self’ but according to Spence at least it is linked to my family history (1992:185). I have analysed my relationship with my Mother, Father and husband and I have questioned fragments of my emotional, physical and sexual identities. Possibly the most significant development during the Masters course has been that I have begun to understand that I could perceive myself as an artist practitioner. In similar ways to Sophie Calle and Tracey Emin I can make visible my personal narrative and inner psychic world through art. As an artist I will continue to search for ‘found’ everyday objects that have a personal resonance and use them in conjunction with still and moving photographic images, possibly referencing the work of Tony Oursler. My personal journey with photography is emerging and I look forward to continuing my relationship with the power of photography which has given me a ‘voice’.