Susan Borowitz experienced her first clinical depression as she approached mid-life. “My trigger was a small piece of paper.”
She remembers the planes flying near her house from a nearby airport. She recalls: “Whenever I heard these planes, my anxiety would soar, and I’d go deeper into depression.”
Borowitz eventually sought help from psychotherapy and medications. She recovered from her despair. She discovered photography along the way.
She was experimenting at first, and she learned a lot, but she began to notice a common theme in her photos: “a woman stuck, stuckness, unable of moving forward.” Her thoughts turned to the time she was clinically depression.
Borowitz may be regaining her perspective through her art. She may be strengthening herself for the possibility that it will happen again. Both. She tells me, “I don’t know why I did it.” It just became my job.
When I talk to artists who are creating work that explores their depression, this kind of internal motivation and drive–the idea that photographers don’t necessarily make pictures because they want to, but because they feel like they have to–comes to mind again and again. They end up showing other people that they are not alone, and this is how their work helps them. I asked four photographers for their stories.