Download to fullview plz. It's massive, a bunch of photos stuck together really. A photo-essay on the subject of depression.

Entry for 's contest on depression, self-harm, and suicide.

I'm going to copypaste the documentation I wrote before I actually made the project. It should hopefully explain everything, even if it's a little incoherent:

I resolved to work with photography, and focus on the theme of depression. I chose depression because it seemed the most difficult, and through its difficulty the most interesting. While self-harm and suicide are active and in a sense positive acts, depression is passive, it is entirely within the sufferer. Self-harm and suicide are both actions taken to cope with depression (well, sometimes). The difficulty of actually making art about depression intrigued me. My own experience with depression is such that it is impossible to make art about, at least while one is in it, because there's no energy to use or even anything unique or special about the feeling to be expressed. For me, depression is reasonless and meaningless, and this is its most debilitating aspect. I can only talk about its effects on my life, and these are frequently monotonous and boring (not doing anything, for example).

I decided to study the mundane. To purposely make uninteresting photographs. I also decided to build on my previous studies of entropy (in short: the inevitability of disorder coming from order, of decay, of organisations and structures losing their form), and consider a little aspect of gender I'd been pondering over recently. It can be argued that the function (social, biological, etc) of a man is to organise the surroundings for women. Building houses, winning bread, pulling out chairs so she can sit down, etc. Depression frequently causes a lapse in this. Mess forms, things build up, things get dirty, you decay (through illness). You lose the ability to fight against the inexorable march of the world towards decay, structurelessness, and chaos.

From another angle, the ways we shape our environments (e.g. our rooms), is to express and extend our identity. Just look at what people put on their walls, what ornaments they have lying around, what clothes they wear. The practical function of these is trivial, but it is incredibly important to our sense of self. It's a shrine. Ever heard of people changing wall displays and moving furniture around when they're going through a tough time? What other explanation is there? I digress. When we are depressed, this shrine falls into disrepair. The waste of our lives begins to take over, empty cans and decaying food. Dust and mess collects.

From these two perspectives, I start my project. One last thing: my project will not contain any people. Depression, for me, means loneliness and isolation. I do not want to picture myself seeming lonely, because me + the implied viewer makes two people (company). There is just the photographer here, just the viewer, alone in this universe, examining their own decay.