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| Category: Health | Fitness | |
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| Exhibit puts a realistic face on those who suffer with it | |
| By Marina Pisano | |
| San Antonio Express-News | |
| Web Posted : 10/12/2003 12:00 AM | |
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Her name is Carmen, and in the photograph she stands on a street corner in shadows as dark as the sickness that envelopes her — schizophrenia.
"I used to cry in a little corner, just crying and screaming because I saw aliens eating children in front of me," the 40-year-old woman says in a recorded narrative. "I like them now. They're my friends now, these aliens ... I think (one) of the terrible things about becoming a schizophrenic is my being labeled and being left out of conversations ... I think being a schizophrenic is all right to have." In the haunting portrait, a shaft of light falls on the pavement, bright against the gloom. For photographer Michael Nye, dark and light symbolize the line between Carmen's frightening illness and health — between a society that fears and stigmatizes the mentally ill and one that treats and includes them. "In all our lives, there's this fine line that we all share," Nye says in his studio on South Alamo Street. "Anyone can become mentally ill. It's the recognition of how vulnerable we are. The fragility of control in who we are as human beings is very present in these stories. It's not those people. It's all of us." That thought is powerfully expressed in his new documentary exhibit, "Fine Line: Mental Health/ Mental Illness," which opened at the Witte Museum on Saturday and runs until Jan. 11. Film screenings, a talk, a panel discussion and dramatic readings are planned in conjunction with the exhibit. The 60 black-and-white photos and the three- to six-minute audio narratives that accompany each image tell stories of pain, abuse, confusion, alienation, sadness and loneliness. No rosy success stories come through the headphones, although some tell of treatment, recovery and hope. The images aren't designed to shock, but they don't romanticize or flatter subjects either, Nye says. Some of the portraits express ambiguity and a precarious state of being. But unlike depictions of the mentally ill in so many movies and photos as bizarre-looking or disturbed, most of the subjects "look like us," Nye says. "All of us get sick at times. These people are sick, and they can get better." Here are the human faces and voices of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, agoraphobia, anxiety, panic disorder, dementia, borderline personality disorder and other illnesses that ravage lives. With funding from the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation, Nye spent four years and hundreds of hours photographing and interviewing subjects, a few from out of state, most from the San Antonio area, including his own neighborhood. With each person's agreement, he edited down hours of tape-recorded interviews to create the short narratives. "The voices take the viewer into the images, and the photos come alive," he says. "There's something about the voice that gives them a presence." A presence, yes, but there is no claim of capturing the essence or totality of anyone or any one illness. Nye recognizes people and mental illness are far too complex for that. In the years that went into the project, subjects got sicker, got better, got sick again. "What you get is a small sliver of a person — one moment." Nye brings impressive credentials to the project. His 1998 Witte exhibit, "Children of Children," a stereotype-smashing look at teen mothers, has traveled to more than 40 cities nationwide, and is still going. He has exhibited at the San Antonio Museum of Art and had more than 25 one-person photography shows, including one at the Arthur Roger Gallery in New York and the Memphis (Tenn.) Brooks Museum of Art. The genesis for "Fine Line" was Kerry Crouch, a man Nye and his wife, poet Naomi Shihab Nye, had known since 1978. The son of Hondo and Shatzie Crouch, Kerry grew up on a ranch outside Fredericksburg. He was tall, handsome, sensitive, artistic and athletic, but his life unraveled when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia while studying architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. He was in and out of hospitals for almost 30 years. In spite of illness, "Kerry was becoming a poet, metaphorically speaking. He made you think about yourself, your life, fragility and all those issues," Nye says. One room of the exhibit is devoted to Kerry, with images and narratives from family members and friends. Shatzie recalls the heartbreaking morning in 1999 when she replanted geraniums and he hanged himself in the garage. Nye decided he couldn't stop with Kerry. Many more powerful, poignant stories and images were out there, and it was important to record them before they were lost. He found subjects by word of mouth, in homeless shelters, through service and health providers and in meetings with advocacy groups. The challenge was building trust with the men and women, who range from professionals to street people. Like Carmen, they are identified only by first names. For background, Nye read the writings of Andrew Solomon, Kay Redfield Jamison and others, and he learned a lot about the brain, genetic and environmental influences and the biological basis of brain disorders. He purposely left out the voices of clinical experts, instead letting people with depression, psychosis or other disorders talk about what it is like to be sick. Nye photographed his subjects over two or three sessions lasting an hour and a half each. Using a large format, 8-by-10-view camera set on a tripod, he shot them in his studio with backdrops, at their homes, in back yards, on city streets and other settings. "It wasn't like, 'Let's try this shot.' They evolved over time," he says. One woman, Beth/Elizabeth, appears twice. She has numbing panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorder and agoraphobia so severe that for years, she sat in the same chair in a nestlike corner of her kitchen, afraid to go out. "It's horror, horror," she says in her narrative, describing a panic attack on a bus. "I can hear and feel my heart pounding like it's knocking on my chest wall." Nye shot Beth two years apart, in two long sessions on a St. Mary's Street corner and by a garden wall. But not in her kitchen chair, because "I'm an artist. I think about aesthetics, not pure, straight documentary." One family member in the exhibit is geriatrician Michael Lichtenstein, a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center, who wanted to make sure the project included dementia, a devastating brain disease he often sees in patients. His paternal grandmother and father died of Alzheimer's disease, and at 51, the physician can't help thinking about genetics. "We all sort of joke about it — these little memory lapses. We laugh about it, but there's this running current of dis-ease, and you wonder what your future will hold," he says. In the photo, Lichtenstein is getting up from a chair." It looks to me like I'm about to go into the darkness. I don't know what's out there, but I've got to go," he says. As an exhibit worker mounted photographs in a Witte gallery one morning, Nye marveled at the courage of his subjects in agreeing to take part in the project despite the public biases and personal demons they live with. "Some of these people are so fragile. I wanted to make sure they were treated with respect. I hope I've done that." Working on "Fine Line" has changed him, he says, brought him closer not only to the mentally ill but anyone on the fringes of society. "I don't think I can ever walk by a homeless person again without saying hello. There's an enormous loneliness there." In the end, Nye hopes the project stirs conversation and social conscience. "The question is what is the responsibility of our community, our town and our country? There are hundreds of thousands of individuals that do not have support and treatment — either homeless or incarcerated or even middle class but they can't afford it. I want these stories to move people to action, to advocacy. Being so powerful, I believe they will." Frances Wise, executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in San Antonio and a member of the Witte exhibit's community advisory committee, believes that, too — that the compelling and intimate photos and narratives will educate and change minds. "We've had anti-stigma campaigns," Wise says. "But what makes a difference is when you find out somebody two desks away from you at work has a mental illness, but they're on medication. That shifts the way you think about mental illness, and that's what I think Michael's exhibit will do. There will be some kind of personal connection made that makes people stop and think for a moment. There's more to this person than his diagnosis." One of the most moving narratives in "Fine Line" consists of four people talking about what sadness is. They describe sadness as feeling there's no hope, no way out of a cold, scary place — sadness as an eating away of the soul — sadness as time wasted and a life that might have been but wasn't. Ironically, the saddest part of Carmen's narrative is when she talks about being happy — a happy time in childhood when she tap-danced and a crowd, real or imaginary, clapped, cried and "loved me to death." "And it made me feel like I was doing some sort of success in my life. And I thought I would always grow up tap-dancing. Sorta like Sammy (Davis) Jr."
mpisano@express-news.net
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| 10/12/2003 |
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