First can I ask you this: when in your life have you been profoundly scared?

I’ll tell you mine. At 18: I choke on a peanut, unable to breathe while people around me laugh, thinking I’m joking. At 24: my car aquaplanes during a storm on a New York country road and I nearly crash into oncoming traffic. At 28: having just given birth to my first child, I run behind a security guard at 5am unable to keep up as he’s rushing our 17 hours old to the neonatal ICU. She’s in hypothermia and isn’t responsive anymore. At 31: I am in quarantine holding my second child, looking at the tubes and wires attached to her. The pediatrician tells me the oxygen supply will hopefully soon address the cerebral hypoxia caused by the bronchiolitis. He adds that RSV kills infants under 8 weeks old also in another way: their heart sometimes just stops, without a warning. My baby is 7 weeks old. Around 11pm I’m alone with her when all alarms go off – her heartbeat isn’t registering anymore. It happens 5 times that night. At 35: I slip on ice and fall on the back of my head, I feel my brain softly jiggle in my skull and all goes black. Today: I feel locked-in during migraine attacks, unable to move – my mind held prisoner, trying to escape my immobile body.

Is it surprising that all those events were related to the fear of death? After all, there are plenty of other times that we feel scared and they’re not always bad – say, a first kiss. But maybe fear is not the right word. We are nervous, anxious maybe, but we are (hopefully) not actually terrified. When you’re confronted with your mortality or that of your loved ones, you get to know terror.

I know this image looks eerie. It might even be frightening.
Good.
I’m not trying to be cheeky here – but Good indeed 🙂 . Cause I WAS frightened. I was out of my mind terrified… If you feel some kind of anguish or at least discomfort looking at it, then I will have managed in conveying something that resonates deep within me.

This, this is work in progress and I’m told you should never show work in progress and instead wait till the whole series is completed. But it is too important to me and I guess I need to share a bit of it. There is no doubt in my mind that I want to shoot this – I need to shoot this. Better yet I love to shoot this!! If you’re worried about me, please don’t be 😉 First off, this is probably the most “disturbing” photograph I’ve created so far. But mostly, I still like to see the beauty in life – who knows, maybe I’ll also do a series on Love (I’ve got some ideas…)!

Right now though, this stuff excites me and I am finally allowing myself to break free of all kinds of little mental cages I had for myself. So I do hope you love this work, despite or exactly because of its strangeness. Cause I’ll continue exploring this. I have to. Is it part of an healing process? Quite possibly. Is it an artistic release? Absolutely. It is personal? Hell yes. Is it universal? I think it is too.