“You Wouldn’t Be So Depressed If You Really Believed in God” is a photographic response to my lifelong battle with depression. Through abstracted self-portraiture, I explore how this invisible illness affects my children, my creative practice, and my relationship with daily life. In turn, through photography I look at how my faith (or lack there of), Latina cultural assumptions, and role as mother shape how I understand and relate to depression. I do not attempt to create self-portraits in the traditional sense, but instead I show the fragmented and sometimes distorted ways in which I experience relationships and the mundane rituals of every day life.. When I was having a particularly hard time, my mother would say: “You wouldn’t be so depressed if you really believed in God.” As a child, this advice made me feel that I was completely powerless. “You Wouldn’t Be So Depressed If You Really Believed In God” is a photography project I started around the year 2010 and hope to complete by 2026. The scholarship money would help fund the publication of a book. A few of the main objectives that I hope to accomplish with the project are creating an additional 10-15 images, hiring a graphic designer to help in designing the final monograph, find a photography book publisher to work with, create three 50”x40” large prints to exhibit and have the work seen by a larger audience.
