The role of the photograph in the conversation of mental illness is fraught with misrepresentation. Since its infancy the photographic image has been used as a means of portraying those living with mental illness as frail, or violent. My photographs question this history and, the use of prescription medications in contemporary treatment of mental illness without considering the physical and chemical makeup of the individual being treated. My photographs incorporate medications used to alter the chemistry of the mind into the salted paper print process producing images that are unsettling and, in some cases, unstable. They exist as secondhand accounts of what mental instability and adverse reactions to medication might look like.
Culbertson, Brian James. Adverse. Master's Thesis. East Carolina University, April 2018. The Scholarship. http://hdl.handle.net/10342/6771. April 22, 2019.
Culbertson, Brian James, “Adverse” (Master's Thesis., East Carolina University, April 2018).
Culbertson, Brian James. Adverse [Master's Thesis]. Greenville, NC: East Carolina University; April 2018.