ABOUT

Today we face a large number of young people suffering from mental health problems.
Depression, Schizophrenia, Anxiety, Autism. The government deals with those subjects with “pills” and limited-time free support services. Medications are considered enough to boost the chemical balance in people brains and fill the lack of serotonin but in mental health that’s not always the case. Medications are not a valid substitute for comprehensive emotional support.
Young self-arming people need to be heard. Reducing their self-harming destructive behaviour without correctly listening to them or degrading the issue is not going to solve the problem and will not change the way they feel. Soon enough they will go back to that dangerous path.
The photographic project "A Blood Issue" wants to extend this reality to the community, opening a door that lets people inside self-harming subjects' everyday life. It wants to be an opportunity and invitation to everybody to free their inner suffering and destructive selves and show it as it is, with no filters or taboos, in the hope to get truly listened to. The project is and will remain an inclusive "work-in-progress" that aims to collect a variety of subjects and experiences.
As a starting point, I wanted to create a safe relationship and collaboration with two different subjects to analyse their lives and private thoughts, with the promise to express their feelings to a bigger audience through photography. We decided to settle the shooting in their own intimate safe space and take every shot while having a conversation about how they feel and how external people perceive their behaviour. We achieved to make them feel confident to show to the camera what happens while they’re having “a moment” and what can be the consequences of gaining too much control over their bodies ignoring theirs minds. Creating a protected feeling-free environment where they had total control over how they wanted to show their emotions allowed me to penetrate their world with my camera and capture the exact moment in which their mind loses control over their bodies.

Jak’s self-harming is an expression of a feeling he cannot control any longer, which became his only way to communicate with people around him and his own personal emotional sphere.
To Jak playing with his blood is almost a "form of art", it's his only way to be able to draw since his body started shaking every day.
To his family, it became normal to see him walking around covered in blood sometimes. They don't know how to deal with him and tent to do not to say anything to don't aggravate the way he feels.

Pixie’s scars are the representation of the dangerous consequences those people face every day. Her courage to let me picture her wounds is a manifesto inviting people to listen up to mental health deep feelings and be more sensitive about subjects struggling in their everyday lives. Pixies medications alienate her mind and keep her under control, but are not making her life any better and she struggles with enjoying happy moments.

We created a photographic storytelling that shows how self-harming people live the day, in their real world, instead of just promoting awareness. We invite you to Listen.