Making Depression Visible: A Decade of Self Portraits

Abstract

In exploring my experience of living with chronic depression, I delve into a collection of self-portrait photographs spanning the past decade, and critically analyze my embodied performances depicting the experience of depression in front of the lens of a camera. Through analyzing representations, interpretations and broader cultural ideas communicated within these photographs, I engage with them using photo memoir as an autoethnographic research method. By doing this, I aim to bring to light facets of how depression has felt like to me personally, but also to broader public feelings and experiences of depression in larger sociocultural
contexts.