Images create personal story about anxiety
> BY AMANDA SIEBERT
It’s a feeling that those who know their way around a Canon AE-1 or a Pentax Spotmatic will understand: the mounting suspense as each release of the shutter gets you closer to a full roll of film.
More tense still is the time spent waiting to have the roll developed: Will the images be overexposed? What if I didn’t wind the film correctly? Questions of self-doubt often abound.
Now imagine the feeling Jackie Dives had as she asked these questions of the 28 undeveloped rolls of film that she hung on to for more than 20 years.
Until recently, Dives had no idea that the photographs in question would reveal a carefully nuanced but deeply personal narrative about her battle with mental illness.
These days, Dives has turned her passion into a career, and can’t recall a time when the camera hasn’t felt like an extension of herself. Specializing in portraiture and documentary photography, she captures subjects in a way that’s organic and unobtrusive. For Dives, the pile of undeveloped film pointed to a significant gap in her body of work, one she was curious about and admittedly afraid to examine.
“As a kid, I was always interested in photography, but I guess I never thought that the photos would be worth the money that it cost to get them developed,” Dives says to the Straight from her home in Mount Pleasant. Money was often tight, and though she would develop rolls intermittently, most were banished to a Ziploc bag in her closet.
“Now, being a professional photographer, this bag of almost 30 rolls was starting to weigh on me, and I thought, even if everything in there sucks, I still feel like it’s unfinished work,” she says.
Dying of curiosity but knowing full well that entire rolls could be faded, degraded, or blank, Dives took the bag to London Drugs.
The results were mixed: In some cases, she had no recollection of taking the images, or she simply didn’t find them compelling. Others were filled with images indicative of adolescence: road trips, beach adventures, a highschool trip to Japan, an entire roll from a birthday party in a limousine—and then there were the self-portraits.
“There were quite a few, and they all seemed very vulnerable,” Dives says. “Because I knew the history of the photos and how they were taken, it really kept magnifying my years of living with anxiety and depression—in all of the pictures of myself, I could really see that person, that girl who I used to be, and who I still strongly identify with.”
To the unknowing eye, the curated stills in her show Slow Like a Bruise, Quick Like Hunger, which will be displayed at a pop-up gallery for one night only, might reveal a familiarity that speaks to the awkward experience of being a teenager, but to Dives, each carefully composed frame reminds her of the moments before and after the shutter click: heart-to-heart conversations, contemplative silences, moments of self-doubt and angst.
For Dives, using her camera to capture the world was a way of making sense of it. Though she might not have admitted it then, she understands photography’s power as a tool for recovery.
“I think in retrospect, yes, creating art in any form is therapeutic, and taking pictures was a huge part of my journey, but at the time, I don’t know if I would have known my pictures were tools for healing,” she says.
Dives says it’s daunting to consider how some might critique her very personal body of work, but she hopes that by showcasing it, other people might relate. “I’m finding that it takes people like me, who are more open, to help bring attention to issues that others might not be comfortable with,” she says. “If nothing else, people can see my experience, and if it helps them, cool. If they feel less alone, that’s cool too.”