The pictures you chose are mostly from my time in Kosovo which was a while back. At the time, it was more important to me to describe the decrepit state of things and how patients are abused. You discover a violent world and you react to it for a while. Later on, I became accustomed to it and I now concentrate on behaviour, cycles or patterns which goes back to the original reason why I started this project. I prefer to observe people and have relationships with them. In essence, the space you make with patients happens in a time warp. Other elements such as the institution, the doctors, the therapists, the families can of course not be ignored but they act more as a disturbance to the process.

Regarding what you wrote about originality and clichés. I think that in this particular case, I prefer to call them archetypes. I’d like to have enough knowledge and experience to understand the motifs better and find a way to render them in photographs. A conscious decision to shoot in a different technique or choosing different elements can of course make the pictures more original but it wouldn’t necessarily uncover much. A trap is that people assume you are dealing with “original” human beings and that the images need to mirror that. In fact, it might be the exact opposite. You are dealing with the raw matter that constitutes what we are all made of. You see human beings at their chores, without the thousands of layers that make normality possible.

Mental illness is one of the most classical subject there is because it goes back to the first man and is impermeable to change. There is a passage in the New Testament where Jesus cures a psychotic man in Gadara. The illness and conditions described, the pretension and myths to cure them, have practically not changed.

“It is not possible to be original except on a basis of tradition.”
D.W. Winnicott,