Anxiety

2016

When I felt depressed or unhappy my mother used to tell me that there’s a lot of people who have it much worse than me. She suggested that I should go to a hospital, to a hospice or to a homeless shelter. I eventually found the people my mother was referring to on the Internet. The first time I encountered a forum on anxiety I was having trouble with breathing and I googled my symptoms. I found people describing their anxiety, everyday struggles, diseases and treatments. Some of the posts I could relate to yet, at the same time, I thought myself lucky that I’m not so far gone.

Regardless of content, these confessions brimming on my computer screen by people likely miles away (or perhaps next door) were the most powerful and real emotions I had ever come across. In time, I tried to visualise these emotions. When I searched the Internet for “anxiety” I found stock pictures of people screaming, crying, holding their heads in their hands. But for me anxiety is neither as spectacular nor as concrete. It has no definable shape. It’s as commonplace and ordinary as everyday life, which is why at first my pictures seem to be images of the prosaic. To an anxious mind they might mean something completely different.

Weronika Perlowska is a photographer based in Warsaw, Poland. A Masters graduate in Documentary Filmmaking from the University of Warsaw, she is interested in new documentary and photography that combine record and conceptual approaches with social media and the Internet.