An LSU grad never expected her photo project 'My Anxious Heart' to go viral. But now that it has, she’s started a global conversation about mental health
It started with bird cages, water jugs and baby powder. With each click of her camera, Katie Joy Crawford arranged and rearranged her props.
Using Photoshop, she turned blue sheets black and stitched three self-portraits into one image.
Through photography, the LSU fine arts major transformed clocks and hourglasses into visual metaphors for her struggles with anxiety. After months of trial and error, she had assembled a 12-photo story called “My Anxious Heart.”
Crawford bared her soul for the project. She never dreamed people across the globe would see it months later.
This summer, her photo essay went viral, published on sites like USA Today, Mashable and Refinery29 and shared hundreds of times on Facebook.
Sitting today in a coffee shop, the 23-year-old is low-key, dressed in jeans and a tank top as dark as her long, black hair. She’s soft-spoken but not shy. After weeks of interviews with reporters covering the project, she can talk easily and openly about her struggles with anxiety.
“I so anticipated being freaked out by it and not wanting the attention. But I was really pleased that the focus was not on me but anxiety,” Crawford says. “When you make yourself vulnerable, people can start to relate. There’s power in numbers and there’s healing in numbers.”
Looking at a printed contact sheet of photos from the project, she recalls the year she spent working on the photo essay. She wanted the photos to be raw but ethereal—surreal rather than literal.
“A lot of people have said that they’re too beautiful or romantic for what they’re meant to represent,” she says. “I didn’t want people with anxiety to look at these and feel a trigger.”
She points to a photo that represents how she feels when she has a panic attack. In the image, her mouth, neck and shoulders are wrapped tightly in plastic wrap.
“I intentionally left my nose free because when you’re panicking you feel like you can’t breathe, even though you can,” she explains.
Crawford has suffered from panic attacks since adolescence. When her panic attacks were at their worst, she had them daily. The attacks were nauseating, often making her physically ill. She’d sometimes miss a month of school. As an adult, her anxiety forced her to withdraw from college three times.
“The feeling was almost like that childhood feeling of being homesick—even though you were already at home,” she describes the attacks. “You can be fine, hanging out with your friends and have a panic attack. Before it starts you’re fine and once it’s over you’re fine. It’s different than having the flu, where it’s gradual. … You never know how long it’s going to take to end.”
Working on the project forced Crawford to examine what was triggering her panic attacks and face her struggles with anxiety head-on. Even getting the camera to function and focus the way she needed it to for the project felt like another struggle to overcome.
“I feel like I physically got to battle something while I was mentally battling something,” she says.
Crawford says she’s often asked why her project doesn’t seem to have an ending.
“There is no finality because I’ve not broken free [from anxiety],” she says. “I don’t know that I’ll be cured, but I know that I’m leaps and bounds from where I was.”
She’s lucky, she says, because her mom and sister always encouraged her to talk about her anxiety. Her mother struggled with depression and anxiety, too, and her sister is a mental health therapist.
She and her sister are working on a book featuring all 12 images from the photo series.
In the meantime, prints of her work are also available online at Society6.
Crawford graduated from LSU in the spring and is not sure where life will take her next. She’s not sure if photography is her calling, but she does feel it was put in her life as a way to reach others.
“I just love the idea of people being able to come to me and be completely open,” she says.
She hopes to get back behind the camera soon. Only this time, she plans to have others who struggle with mental health act as her models.
The new project will showcase standalone images for each person.
Crawford will work with her subjects to visualize their feelings on camera—giving them a chance to tell their stories the way she told hers. katiejoycrawford.com
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