Exploring PTSD with Todd
Todd came to me carrying a history, a story too heavy for words alone. HIs is not a story with a beginning, middle, and end, but an open wound, a fragmented tale of multiple traumas. He arrived not to confess, not for absolution, but to be seen. In front of my lens, he stood like a man both burdened and unburdened, every pose a testament to survival, every glance an accusation against a world indifferent to the pain it inflicts.
This was our first session. A trial run. A tentative step into uncharted waters. Todd spoke sparingly, his sentences clipped, his words freighted with memories: raw and unforgiving. Trauma has a way of hollowing out language, so I turned to photography, my medium of choice to visually articulate when words fail. Each flash of my strobe became a question, each frame an answer I wasn’t sure I wanted.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is often misunderstood, dismissed as a soldier’s ailment or Hollywood trope. PTSD is fucking insidious, a thief robbing its victims of sleep, of joy, of trust. For Todd, it is a shadow following him everywhere, a weight he’s unable to set down. And yet, there he was, standing in the light, willing to confront it — or at least sharing its shape with me.
The statistics paint a grim picture: millions worldwide suffer from PTSD, a condition born not only of war but of childhood abuse, domestic violence, accidents, and a slow erosion of the soul in the face of unrelenting hardship. It does not discriminate. It ensnares the strong, the weak, the fortunate, the unfortunate. And it lingers, often untreated, turning lives into battlegrounds.
Todd is not a statistic, though. He is a man—a father, a soldier, a friend, a survivor. And, as we work together on this series, I am struck by the enormity of what he has endured, the courage it takes to keep going, the quiet defiance of showing up, again and again, for himself, for his family, for his country, for this. Our sessions are not therapy, though I argue there is something therapeutic in creating, in the deliberate act of shaping pain into something tangible, something others might witness and, perhaps, understand.
Our first session was a beginning, a foothold on a steep climb. As we continue, I know our images will deepen, the story will darken, the truths will become harder to face. There is also hope here, not the facile hope of easy resolutions, but the stubborn, unyielding hope of a man refusing to surrender to his past.
In the end, this series is not just about Todd. It is about everyone who suffers, who endures, who carries a weight no one else can see. It is for those who have been silenced by trauma and for those who seek to listen.
Stay with us. The story is just beginning.