The Resiliency Project: Origin Story
The Resiliency Project is a labor of love. The idea came to me in the late Winter/early Spring of 2023. After going through a dark time mentally and emotionally after a particularly tough relationship, I felt I was in a more empowered and healthy place to create a body of work that would spotlight the importance of mental health. What is the best way to highlight the importance of something that still has so much stigma around it? This is one of the first questions I asked myself. As an artist, the best method I could think of was photography. As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But, I understood with the topic of mental health, photographs are not going to tell the whole story. Each person’s journey with their mental health is deeply personal. I understood if I am going to do a photography project about mental health I needed to showcase this.
The Resiliency Project was announced in June 2022 and by July of that year my first two participants had completed their photoshoots. The project, as I created it, is a space for each person who chooses to participate, to share their personal story and journey with mental health. A series of 5 open-ended questions allows for sharing one’s struggles, battles, and triumphs with their mental health. The photographs that accompany each story spotlight each person.
The goal with this project is gather 50 participants who are ready to share their mental health story and create a coffee table book of photographs and personalized stories-showcasing that there is more than one face to mental health. The larger goal is to de-stigmatize the conversation around mental health. I believe, by using photography as the medium, the eventual readers of this book will know there is no one face in this daily battle. Photography can cause us to confront what we often try to conceal; it captures emotions, states of being, and humanity in ways that we often avoid.
Hence the importance making mental health the topic of choice and further more for personalizing it through individual stories. The Resiliency Project is way telling one aspect of the human experience.