PhotoEd Magazine - Issue #58 Spring/Summer 2020
Peppa Martin
A comprehensive 19-year study recently published by the World Health Organization (WHO) found that art has positive overall effects for mental and physical health at all stages of life. Wellness experts around the world increasingly recognize the indisputable health benefits of spending personal time with art, to the extent of even prescribing museum visits to combat illness.
If interacting with art, even merely as an observer, has the therapeutic power to improve our moods and responses, what happens when an artist dives deep into her photography practice searching for emotional solace, healing, and equilibrium?
Vancouver photographer Shira Gold discovered the important intersection of photography, mental health and wellbeing during a period of personal crisis, and how those crucial connections would ultimately guide her journey through loss and grief.
Born in 1977 and raised in Vancouver, Shira, at the behest of her parents, spent several teenage years learning photography at Arts Umbrella, a local non-profit centre for youth arts education. It was something of an antidote to her difficult, ongoing struggle in high school where she fought hard to meet conventional expectations, and defy negative and discouraging early childhood messages.
Her self-esteem steadily eroded, and this lack of confidence could have been crippling if it weren’t for her camera. It offered Shira a sliver of control over something concrete, and became a tool to interact with the world and express her point of view in a positive way. That involved acknowledging and purposefully connecting with feelings of discomfort, and to intentionally deconstruct experiences that felt overwhelming.
“It’s the only time in my life when my mind and my heart feel aligned.” she said.
Repetitive motion is a widely accepted behavioral therapy technique for lowering heart rate and blood pressure, and to calm an overactive mind. On the advice of health professionals, Shira tried, among other things, running, knitting, and deep breathing exercises to achieve these goals. Results were less than satisfying, and not especially effective in slowing her racing thoughts.
Then came an implosion. In 2003, when Shira’s mother Melanie became seriously ill, she made the pivotal decision to leave her style and textile career to become Melanie’s primary caregiver. Mired in grief after the loss of her mother, Shira desperately sought a healing mechanism to relieve the searing pain of mourning. It was photography that, again, came to her rescue, providing the urgent support needed to navigate this difficult period. Picking up her camera again she says, “was like finding my breath.”
What Shira discovered to be genuinely therapeutic was the simple, repetitive act of making images, regardless of the subject, or the time available or the end result. Through this process she learned to visually diarize what she couldn’t articulate. “It was visual therapy,” she said.
Later diagnosed with ADHD at 35, the camera was a tool for harnessing her distracted thinking and, along with summoning mental focus, making photographs allowed her to slow down and be, as she describes, “fully in the moment.”
Shira described the bewildering period from becoming her ailing mother’s primary caregiver for three years, to her loss and bereavement, to authoring and self-publishing a guidebook (‘Choosing Joy’s Empowerment Index’ ) to motherhood : “It was like all the space in life between struggles and triumphs compressed and there wasn’t room to process what I had been through.”
Relying on her camera, Shira was able to explore the depth of her loss, and allow herself time to digest confusing feelings and fears. Turning instinctively to art, she sought to create images of isolated stillness and beauty, parsed from complicated and painful moments. Drawing on her relationships as both a daughter and a mother, her photographs explore and expand themes of grief, loss, identity and change.
With that aesthetic approach, Shira went on to create a body of work titled ‘Good Grief’, which presents a collection of landscape portraits that serve as a visual dissertation of her movement through loss. This series earned her an Honourable Mention in the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, a nomination to the Fine Art Photo Awards, a semi-finalist spot in the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series and also Finalist in the LensCulture Art Photography Awards.
“If sharing my stories makes others feel less alone in their life circumstances, then maybe that’s the most important thing I do. My work has always been driven by my life and all the crazy, wonderful, painful experiences. As one who lives my days with a busy mind, there are few things that create pause and reflection. I think when we tap into our vulnerability and channel it in our art, we are being authentic. That helps us to better understand ourselves, and to find balance and beauty in life.”