The Sea I Swim In

I'm not entirely sure when it started… Probably in my very late teens, with some anxiety attacks and a few episodes of self harm and insomnia. Loads of insomnia. Therapy and fleeing the country made it all better, mostly, for about 10 years. Then the anxiety came back, but that was easy to dismiss as work related stress - so I quit my job. Looking back, depression was always there, in the background, progressing; until there was no space between the background and the foreground, until it surrounded me and permeated everything; then it just became the sea I was swimming in. That’s when I got told to get professional help. 
As medical treatment progressed, I became curious about how therapy and medication would affect the way I approached the world. If it worked, would I start seeing things differently? So I started to capture images with my smartphone, with determination, but no real plan, grabbing moments, scenes, when I felt like it, when something caught my attention, or when it felt relevant within the context of my recovery process. I imposed some sort of dogma to myself: Post processing had to take place within minutes of taking the picture. No image manipulation could be redone or revised. Images had to remain in chronological order. No image from other cameras or photo-shoots could be introduced. No image could be left out of the project, unless there were near identical doubles. This self imposed discipline meant that I could not dramatise or underplay the context of the photographs later. If the images turned out boring or impossible to relate to, that would still be a true testimony of what things looked like, and felt like, to me. In June 2017, I stopped taking pictures for this project, like I had always planned.
This book compiles all photographs from the project that came to be known as The Sea I Swim In. Over 100 photos are in it, twice as many as shown in the exhibition that also resulted from the project. Texts, annotations and captions give additional context to the images. Here is a timeline, a testimony of how creativity and art can be very powerful tools in a therapeutic strategy to deal with mental health issues. 

William Debois - October 2017