CRAZY – Living with mental illness with works by Laia Abril (Spain), Sibylle Fendt (Germany), Nora Klein (Germany), Louis Quail (UK) and Melissa Spitz (USA).
More than one in four adults in Germany suffers from a mental disorder during their lifetime. The most common symptoms are anxiety, depression and addiction. For the almost 18 million people affected and their social environment, this often results in massive restrictions in all areas of their lives.
Although mental illnesses affect a large part of the population, they are often stigmatized and tabooed. There are unclear ideas about living with mental illnesses in their various manifestations; individual clinical pictures unsettle outsiders. Thus it is hardly possible to get close to those affected in their world.
The exhibition CRAZY – Living with mental illness presents works by five internationally renowned photographers. They have dealt with the subject for very personal reasons.
The Spanish photographer Laia Abril tells the story of the Robinson family in her internationally acclaimed series The Epilogue. The Robinsons lost their youngest daughter due to bulimia.
In Gärtners Reise (Gärtner’s Voyage), the Berlin based OSTKREUZ photographer Sibylle Fendt documents the last journey of the couple Lothar and Elke Gärtner. Two years before the journey, Elke Gärtner had been diagnosed with dementia.
The photographer Nora Klein from Erfurt tried together with people affected by the disease to translate depression in pictures. Her first illustrated book Mal gut, mehr schlecht. (Sometimes good, mostly bad.) has been published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
The Brit Louis Quail shows in his intimate photographic approach Big Brother his brother’s life with schizophrenia.
New York-based photographer Melissa Spitz dedicates her work You Have Nothing to Worry About to the emotional life of her seriously mentally ill mother.
With kind support of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Nervenheilkunde e. V. (DGPPN; German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics).
Photo: © Louis Quail from the series Big Brother.