For the past few years, Seattle-based Leah Freed has been using traditional and alternative techniques with film and darkroom chemicals to better understand and move through her daily struggles with anxiety and depression. Her images are abstract, textural, and dark. They visualize the “feeling” of depression’s existential, incapacitating gravity.
Leah Freed Breath Study 12
Freed’s recent thesis exhibition at Seattle’s Photographic Center Northwest,Feeling Bad About Feeling Good About Feeling Bad, pulls from her obsessive need to make work as a distraction, helping her cope with everyday stressors she describes as “things that linger and absorb mental focus, time, and energy.” It’s a continuous, repetitive, and therapeutic cycle. In exhibition form, a grid of more than 100 variations of a technical mishap from a 35mm negative—each printed by hand using lith chemistry—looks like an aged surface of the moon: open and impressionable, yet falling apart. Freed animates these into a painfully slow-burning video that’ll make you cry just by watching it.
Leah Freed Breath Study 11
© Leah Freed
Freed’s longest-standing series is Breath Studies, which she makes by placing a pinhole camera loaded with 4×5-inch light-sensitive paper on her chest during panic attacks and lets it expose as she gathers her thoughts, counting to ten each time. The resulting black-and-white pictures, contact prints made directly from her negatives, show various stages of clarity—bits of clouds and dark skies blend together, illustrating the weight of the world above.
Michele Usher 