Kian's Story: Photography Gives Me Connection to the World

The Dissociation Photography Project is something I have been working on for a couple of years now. From 2021 onwards I have been on a journey of self-exploration. Photography is something I was able to find in the midst of my darkest days, my connection to the sunsets, forests and the moon allowed me to start feeling a part of the greater world - us humans are a part of nature, just as much as anything else. Whether or not the world was real to me, I could still capture some beauty and remove the distortion. There is beauty, even within the unreal. I started to realise that every single moment was a photo opportunity - every view, every person and every moment has a beauty that can be captured, from which we can create an entire story from. I guess that's what photography means to me, anyway.

I feel that my photos do a much better job of capturing how I really feel and felt about myself and the world around me. On darker days, I could add distortion, discolouration and desaturation - showing how flat and empty my dissociation can make the world. While on brighter days, everything could become sharper, more in focus and all of the colours could be more vivid. Every single one of my favourite photos has a specific story to tell. One I hope to share fully in a book someday.

The majority of the photos in my Dissociation collection were taken in 2022 - the year I first felt fully able to explore my dissociation and my experience with it. This was important, because I had never been able to find a way to fully explain how it feels, until I had a visual representation to describe it from. Now I could show a specific image and tell someone 'this is how it feels when I am experiencing this...'

At the end of 2022, I received my diagnosis of Mixed Dissociative Disorder, primarily experiencing DPRD (Depersonalisation/Derealisation Disorder), but also with altering states of consciousness and amnesia. This diagnosis was a long time coming, I frequently gaslit myself, but the more we investigated, the more we saw that dissociation had been my struggle from the beginning. Recounting times even as a young child where I had asked whether reality was truly something that existed, hiding in corners and telling people, 'Well, I thought nobody saw me, because I don't exist...' it was pretty apparent that that was an issue for a long time before that.

One piece makes me particularly happy is called 'Portal into my World', and light showing that my photography and a camera can transport people and have a view of my world, I hope that it's true. I can show people not only how I see myself through things like this project, but I can also show people what I wish I could see of the world and enhance the beauty that otherwise seems two-dimensional to me.

Joe PerkinsSeptember 28, 2023