Eye On Texas: Mediscapes

AUSTIN - As a photographer and psychiatric patient, I simultaneously observe and participate in the obsessive and compulsive documentation of the self and the objects I interact with on a daily basis. My images focus on the moment; capturing, cataloguing and in some cases immediately assigning that moment meaning through text by “tagging” on Flickr or “hashtagging” on Instagram. This assignment serves two functions: It secures a virtual memory of my medical history that I am able to refer back to, and it allows me to interact with other photographers and patients. The instantaneous nature of this point-and-post process, a rapidly emerging facet of social networking, provides me with multiple outlets to sustain my obsessive documentation of the relationship I have with medication and the relationship medication has to its environment. This environment may be the personal, private space or the public, social space. Consequently, I perform as an agent of modern social media.