Pregnant Woman with House Plant

Image_8763, Pregnant Woman with House Plant © Richard Ansett 2015

kiss me...

Farmer with Mistletoe at dawn © Richard Ansett

Out of Place

There is an inevitable existential loneliness associated with adoption, a detachment from one's very genetic foundations can have a profound effect on our sense of place in the world.  With the acceptance of this, comes a realisation that the other side of the coin of the great gift of love and rescue by our adopted parents, is the trauma of loss and abandonment.

Stephanie (below) is adopted, I felt she had a great need to make sense of her world. When I shared that I was adopted too, I seemed to her like a successful survivor of the transition from one universe to another. I brought her outside and placed her in the mud. She did not feel she belonged here and it was not where she wanted to be.

Stephanie standing in the mud © Richard Ansett

Woman with Contractions and Parrot

Woman with Contractions and Parrot © Richard Ansett

If you're feeling apprehensive about contractions, try to focus on what an amazing job your body is doing while you're going through them.

Your uterus (womb) has a powerfully muscular wall that tightens and then relaxes to ease your baby gradually down through your cervix and vagina. If you put your hand on your belly during a contraction, you may feel your uterus harden as the muscle contracts.

This tightening and relaxing means that you'll probably feel contractions as wave-like, building in intensity to a peak, before fading.

Dignity

In the garden of a hospital in Ukraine I met a boy who had been attacked by a dog, the physical scarring on his face equalled only by a silent communication of a deeper emotional damage. The unsympathetic gaze of the camera had accidentally exposed the most tender and vulnerable elements of his world in that moment.

I am attracted to any altered state that explores the boundaries of what might be considered normal and in the above example, the boy's emotional damage inspired an investigation of other forms, including learning difficulty and mental illness, as an experiment into how these conditions might represent themselves to a camera under similar conditions.

Before I met the charity that supports the parents of the autistic children that led to the final exhibition ‘Boys in a City Park’, I investigated some other groups caring for young people with varying degrees of mental health, as well as those with Cerebral Palsy. In photographing these young people I was aware of a more brutal and unrepresentative facsimile of their lives when they were exposed to the same objectification and most importantly, I noticed how these representations did not fit into the normative parameters through which we have become accustomed to reading the emotions in photographs.

With Down syndrome the camera saw the condition as a mask to the emotions and as Susan Sontag said most cruelly of Diane Arbus’s work, “When you photograph a dwarf, you don’t see majesty, you just see a dwarf.” I see this now as less shocking in the context of my contemporary experience. I interpret it as more of a commentary of societal parameters, an observation of our inability to ‘see’ those, who are not communicating in a way we can so easily interpret.

Photographing subjects with cerebral palsy or motor-neuron disease presents a unique issue, as the condition is literally a mask to the trapped human being inside a body that won’t behave itself. In recording the subject response with a camera, I cannot trust the physical signs that would reflect emotions in an able bodied person. Not only this but further, during an assignment at a college for disabled young people, I found myself deeply conflicted as I was only comfortable when recording the muscle movements in the face of a subject, Lewis, that would represent him to a normative audience in a palatable way. Photographing Professor Stephen Hawking more recently offered up a similar dilemma; I found myself seeking some semblance of emotional contact that would indicate that within this extraordinary and almost entirely useless frame was a person that we could relate to as normal let alone a genius.

To move perhaps towards a more equitable representation, I feel now that the way to represent subjects, ironically, can only be through the very objectification that feels disrespectful; to not compensate for the expectations of a pitying and patronizing (if well meaning) majority. To do this many compositional rules of aesthetics are not only rendered obsolete but are re-framed as prejudicial and limiting.

Protecting one's dignity or of those less able to fight independently for their own, is a common expectation rooted in a fear of being primarily defined by the surface but it denies the camera an opportunity to capture what is the reality of our lives. Accepting these stereotypical representations based on historical rules is self-limiting, it is our prejudice projected harmfully onto the subject and returned to us as audience. (It is a moral dilemma we are less concerned about in the representation of other, non Western, cultures).

As I applied a version of objectivity to the subjects of one day centre for young adults with learning difficulties in Ukraine, I remember feeling an overwhelming confluence with Diane Arbus, I felt possessed by her spirit, like I was walking in her shoes, I was her and I didn’t like it. It felt like a cold and brutal world, devoid of empathy, driven by the pursuit of an image and a loneliness satiated only by a need to belong to a tribe of 'aristocratic' freaks. 4 years later, as I observe through my camera, a child who cannot breath without needing the mucus to be constantly sucked from her airways by her mother, I realise that I am seeking to record her life as part of the whole, not as a celebration of a mutated Arbus aristocrat on the periphery of the ordinary.

This is a line that must be faced and crossed not just because it is there (deliberately at odds with all compassionate cultural instinct) but in the capture the images are a record reported back to the world of a less explored but equally valid universe. Resulting images are in their nature a debate of the parameters through which we judge each other and are an aggressive challenge to the stereotypical conventions through which society is viewed. The brutality is only relative to the blandness and cowardice of conventional representation.

Lewis, National Star College, England © Richard Ansett

Man with learning difficulties exercising for the camera, Ukraine © Richard Ansett

Untitled, Diane Arbus

Working in Series

I am drawn to working in series, not so much as photo essays but in a more 'Duane Michals' notion of multiple image sequence. The foundation being an analysis of the photograph as interruption of the timeline. There are inevitable similarities to film in so far as multiple still images when seen in contact sheet form can be interpreted as de-constructions of an event between two fixed points. But observing the static contact sheet of a Eadweard Muybridge collotype for instance, increases the level of scrutiny of each frame of the moving image otherwise observed in the original Zoopraxiscope as something, well, 'moving'. We are observing each interruption in the timeline as photographs in their own right but further it is an acknowledgement of multiple alternatives that lead up to and go beyond the nostalgic, and I would argue, dated notion of a singular and 'defining moment'.

Boys Playing on the Grass © Richard Ansett

Chance meeting © Duane Michals

Boxing: Open Hand. Plate 340 - Eadweard Muybridge

Girl with Clock

Laura with Clock © Richard Ansett 2014

Postnatal depression is a depression that some women experience after having a baby.

It can develop within the first six weeks of giving birth, but is often not apparent until around six months.

Postnatal depression is more common than many people realise, affecting around 10 to 15% of women after having a baby.

Teenage mothers are particularly at risk.

Postnatal depression can sometimes go unnoticed and many women are unaware they have it, even though they don't feel quite right.

The symptoms of postnatal depression are wide-ranging from low mood, feeling unable to cope and difficulty sleeping to indifference towards the baby, depression and suicidal thoughts.

Mood changes, irritability and episodes of tearfulness are common after giving birth but these symptoms are often known as the "baby blues" and they usually clear up within a few weeks. However, more persistent symptoms can be postnatal depression.

Some women don’t recognise they have postnatal depression, or they choose to ignore their symptoms because they’re afraid of being seen as a bad mother.

It's very important to understand that postnatal depression is an illness.

If you have it, it doesn't mean you don't love or care for your baby.