You Have Nothing to Worry About.
You Have Nothing to Worry About is a complex and emotionally fraught body of work that can be broadly defined as documentary photography, though it resists the stability that label implies.
Since 2009, I have been making photographs of my mentally ill, substance-abusing mother, Deborah. Her diagnoses have shifted repeatedly from alcoholism to dissociative identity disorder, and she now resides in a long-term care facility; my relationship with her has long been shaped by volatility, animosity, and hopeful devotion. I am fully aware that my mother thrives on being the center of attention and that, at times, our portrait sessions can amplify her erratic behavior.
This tension sits at the core of the work. The photographs are simultaneously upsetting and disarming; honest and theatrical; loving and resentful. They move between documentation and performance, implicating both of us in their construction. By turning the camera toward my mother and toward the space between us, I am not only recording her instability but also tracing my own emotional reflexes: guilt, anger, protectiveness, exhaustion. Her behavior becomes inseparable from my response to it.
Over time, the images have come to function less like isolated documents and more like an ongoing conversation mediated through the lens. Photography becomes our shared language when verbal communication collapses. The camera holds what neither of us can articulate directly: dependency, manipulation, care, and the quiet hope for repair. Rather than offering resolution, You Have Nothing to Worry About dwells in contradiction, asking viewers to sit with discomfort and consider the complicated intimacy that exists when love and damage occupy the same frame.
