2019 Tisch photography and imaging grad Joey Solomon centers his artistic approach around visualizing his own invisible mental disorders. As an openly gay and disabled man, Solomon’s artistic work hones in on the psychology of self and other humans through portrait studies and darkroom accidents using the lens as his medium. Solomon pulls much of his work perspective from personal entanglements with recurring themes of mental and physical illness. His images continue to document motifs surrounding familial shared illness, queer view and the erosion of our Earth. 

In his series “Burning My Own Face,” Solomon printed repeating photographic self-portraits and re-scanned these paper images to further obscure himself with fire, black ink, watercolor and charcoals. With this ongoing collection of self-portraits, he looks to acknowledge internal dissonance and copes by using his photography to grasp what symptoms of his internal ADHD, PTSD, anxiety and depressive disorders may look like in the various stages of his daily triumphs and emotional defeats. Interestingly, Solomon feels as though he is able to detail his experience as a human living with multiple dueling mental illnesses far better through his work. If nothing else, Solomon’s work serves to affirm a learning process our tender and dysfunctional species goes through. 

Email Joey at [email protected].