Scream With Me

                   The main focus of this project is mental illnesses, specifically depression, which is a very serious issue all over the world. Mental illness affects people from all backgrounds through emotions, mannerisms, and even our functionality in society. Within the US, 11.2% of adults 18 and over have standard feelings of anxiety and panic, while only 4.7% suffer from genuine depression. Within this series, I investigate the dramatized visual representation of depression and how it can feel based on personal experience as well as how it has been described by others.

                    I came up with the concept for this project when researching Hidden Mother Photography, which was a specific style of photographing that originated in the victorian era, where a mother would drape herself with fabric either standing behind a chair or seated while propping up her child to keep them calm and looking forward at the photographer. After seeing this photographic style, I took the concept of draping the subject in loose fabric and adding dark and dramatic lighting to show softened forms of the subject’s facial features in order to create this physical representation of what it feels like struggling with depression. The draped fabric creates a veil between the viewer and the subject, which acts as the veil of depression, hiding our true emotions from the rest of the world around us and distorting the viewer’s point of view of the subject.

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Jeremy Rose, Digital Photography, 2020, 13" X 19"

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