As a teen and young adult, I spent all my time inside my room. I always felt alone within these walls, alone when I was out, alone when I was with friends, just alone. Family was not a comfort, it was a cause for much of the stress, anxiety and mainly the sadness I felt. My mother, even though we didn’t speak about it often, suffers from clinical depression. When you are young you just think of it as if your mom is just a little sad, so it makes sense that you also are – a little sad sometimes. As I grew older, and my frustration of the situation grew, I found myself hiding in my room for days, hours and years, buried with my head down in this sand prison. I just felt sad all the time. In this loneliness, I found comfort in photography. Photography allowed me to take my inner dialogue and bring it out by using still life as my personal coded language. I was able to communicate with these objects better than people. They told the story I was not able to. Now, years after moving as far as I could from that room, I find myself still being sad. Photography has become not just an escape but now also my burden. When I don’t photograph I am sad, and when I do photograph my images are sad as well as if I am no longer able to escape the cloud of sad that is above my head. Why am I Sad? is my exploration of my personal relationship to photography and the world that I see through my camera’s lens. It is an open question that I don’t intend to answer but I hope that I can find comfort in it once more. This work in still in progress.

Dana on IG