Home » Mind & Soul » Agoraphobia » More Portraits of Agoraphobia

More Portraits of Agoraphobia

© Katherine E. Rabenau

This month, we are blessed to have a second installment of photographer Corinne Botz' photographic exploration of agoraphobia. (Corinne began this project a little over two years ago - see her first article here: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/agor... ) Corinne originally started out looking to do portraits but in the course of her journey has become equally fascinated by us in our "natural habitats." She has taken some wonderful photos. I highly recommend that you click on each photo to see it in larger form. The small versions don't do the work justice. I also encourage you to help Corinne with this project both by volunteering to be a photographic subject and by, as she requests, sharing your emotional responses to her work. How do these photos make you feel? Do you see yourself in the faces or objects? What about your own environment? How does it foster, comfort, impact, your agoraphobia? But enough from me. Corinne and her photos speak eloquently for themselves.

***********

Corinne's Words

Thank you to everyone who has participated in my project. I know it's not easy to allow a 'stranger' into your house, especially one with a camera, so I'm incredibly grateful for your openness and generosity. And a big thanks to Katherine for inviting me to show more of my photographs on her great website.

I'm interested in hearing people's responses to the images, and from those who participated, any observations concerning the experience of being photographed. So please respond to the photographs in comment area below.

Through this project, I've had the pleasure of meeting many interesting people, and listening to their unique stories about themselves and their experience of space. I also found myself in many fascinating interior spaces, where I noticed the prominence of collections and cats. I've become increasingly interested in the home environments that agoraphobics create, the relationship between individuals and objects, how the objects came into the spaces, how they are arranged, their symbolic power, narratives of safety and protection in objects and spaces etc. These issues are becoming the focus of the project. Thus, in addition to taking more portraits, I plan to photograph additional interiors and collections. I'm also experimenting with different ways (video, writing, audio) to incorporate the stories I've "collected" into the project.

Finding volunteers is never easy. As one woman I photographed wrote me in an e-mail: "Last night when I was going to sleep I was thinking how difficult it must be for you to actually get photographs of your subject matter. Perhaps that will make it even more interesting when it's completed. Ha ha the elusive agoraphobic is a difficult bird to catch."

Courtyard	Barbra's House (mantle), New York State	Barbra's House (cage), New York State	Safety Object	Bruce Kirkby with Camel
Richard and Mary, Michigan	Big Bird and friends		Kasia and Sasha, Illinois	nursingkittens
Confederate General Stephen Ramseur	Puzzles

The copyright of the article More Portraits of Agoraphobia in Agoraphobia is owned by . Permission to republish More Portraits of Agoraphobia in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.