with photography® series
Making Connections With Photography®
– an illustrated autobiography
‘Making Connections With Photography®’ is my personal story that has been plucked out of ‘With Photography® — not just an autobiography’. It is THE autobiography.
Fully illustrated with photographs taken over my lifetime, it showcases my reliance on photography over the years having survived child abuse and a major accident , the combination leaving me with C-PTSD, Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I used the medium to both stay in the moment and distract me as I was growing up.
Living with PTSD, my recovery has been facilitated by subsequently analysing the photographs and by creating others to explore and exorcise residual and unhelpful emotions. This is a true and powerful story.
The photograph on the front cover of ‘Making Connections With Photography®’ is entitled ‘Mingling With The Crowd’. Designed to appear quite conservative, like its creator, there are many different elements held within it; hinted at with just only one decoded message included on the cover – ‘…the exit was clearly visible, it had been there all the time!’
ISBN: 978-0-9928407-4-7
Paperback
Standing alone in the dimly-lit auditorium, surrounded by the empty seats, my mind flashed back to the dark, lonely and frightening places of when I was just 9 years old. “The Cinema” was going to be the most complex and challenging shot in the fifty years that I had been taking photographs.
Later, I stared at the finished print – showing more detail than had been visible to the human eye – I saw more, I saw beyond the image and connected to the emotional darkness of my past.
If only I had been able to see as clearly then as I could now! Perhaps I may have discovered a way out, for the ‘exit’ was clearly visible, it had been there all the time.”
“Sally’s poignant text has also certainly made me think more about what I see when looking through a lens and why I am choosing to capture that moment. ‘Making Connections’ also encourages us to look beyond what is immediately obvious in a photograph and questions what the photographer might have been thinking – why then, why there and why that? Does a photograph record only a moment in time?”
Kathy Chandler