Originality is non-existent

I’m a 19 year old black boy from South Philly premiering my first photo series “GLITTERBOY” on @i_D i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/… @frankocean

Mental Illness is isolating in and of itself, but i’ve always felt further detached and embarrassingly “other” in the sense that I seem to experience my illness in far messier, more inconvenient ways than others I know struggling with similar diagnosis. Struggling with mental illness can make you feel disconnected from the general public in the sense that they don’t know what it is to face a large portion of your daily life, but it’s infinitely more disheartening to feel that you can’t relate to other people who are supposed to understand your struggle. My experience is exhausting and inconvenient, it is not a woman wrapped in a sweater staring out her window with a mug of tea in an anti-depressant commercial. My experience is sloppy and cumbersome, it seems too ugly to share with the world and too divergent from the experience of those close to me to share with my friends, so I keep it to myself. It occurs to me that perhaps the reasons I have kept the full extent of my illness so far away from the public eye is the reason I have no representations of illness to relate to, perhaps this is precisely how others around me feel about their struggle. It’s taken me most of adult life to realize that this struggle is not something that I asked for and not something to be ashamed of in the way that I have been. These self-portraits are an attempt to frankly and unashamedly represent the positions that my mental illness puts me in on a daily basis, easy to look at and otherwise.

Lewis Baltz in “Lewis Baltz and the Garden of False Reality,” by Wolfgang Scheppe, in Lewis Baltz Candlestick Point [Steidl, 2011] (via greatleapsideways)

Dedicated to the Cultural Preservation of the African Aesthetic

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