What good is a picture of the dark?

When I was in high school, I went on a youth group trip to Rehoboth, New Mexico. There was a student a few years younger than me who took pictures of the most bizarre things. He would take multiple pictures of the same bizarre thing, too. A cactus needle really close up. A person from very, very far away. The sun at noon. Things that no one else would think to take pictures of.

One of those bizarre things was a completely black night sky. If you flipped through the pictures of this sky, you would think that he had taken pictures of the inside of his pocket by mistake because they showed up simply as black rectangles. But here's the real story: there was a lightning storm many miles away that night. We could see it from the dorms we were staying in. Lots of us set up camp to watch it for a little while because it looked so cool. The student, let's call him Craig, wanted to take pictures of the lightning storm. He was convinced that if he pushed the button at exactly the right moment, he would capture a streak of brilliant lightning against the black sky. It didn't matter to him that he all he had so far was a bunch of black pictures, or that he was using a simple point-and-shoot digital camera. Craig wanted a picture of lightning and he was going to try to get one no matter how many people said it was impossible.

Without knowing the story of the black pictures, you would learn absolutely nothing from them. You wouldn't know who took them, where they were taken, what they were of, or what the point was. You would say, "What good is this picture of the dark? And why are there so many?" Craig would be able to tell you exactly why he taken those photos, if you'd only ask.

Depression is a collection of black pictures. There's the obvious connection that depression feels like a black cloud or a walk through darkness with no light to guide you. It goes deeper than that, though. From the outside looking in, it's hard to understand depression when all you have to look at is a series of black pictures. The photos themselves don't tell a story, don't show anything useful, don't explain a damn thing. You need the photographer's story - words on paper, words spoken aloud, words that form a story.

But depression can rarely be explained adequately with words. Believe me, I've tried. It's invisible, so I can't describe what it looks like. I can describe what a person may look like if they are experiencing certain symptoms, but that's not the same thing. That's like saying that wind looks like trees moving back and forth. The pain is intangible - I can't point to where it hurts and I can't explain how it hurts, only that it does. You would have to crawl into my head (or perhaps my heart) to understand what depression is and does. All I'm left with are these photographs of the dark that say, "I have borne witness to this, I have been here, I have lived to tell you about it."

Society has taught us to keep quiet about our pictures of the dark. It has taught us that if you can't take a picture of something, it may as well not even exist. A picture of the dark means nothing and proves nothing.

That's not true though. A picture of the dark proves that there was someone present to witness the dark and capture it, if only for a moment. That dark represents something that cannot be seen, but must be felt or heard or lived. And just because you cannot see it does not mean that it doesn't exist.