Photo taken by contributor Carrie Hilgert, a photographer and portrait artist in her thirties from Northeast Kansas. After venturing into digital photography, she became interested in documenting her life with self portraits. This became particularly helpful when her life started to fall apart due to depression. All her other creative outlets left her, but she could always process her very dark feelings with self portraits. While she is doing much better now, she maintains compassion for those going through these hard things and hopes that her photography can give an honest insight into something that makes most people feel very isolated and alone.
About this photo: “I was just beginning to take self portraits when I shot this in 2010. I wasn’t happy with myself or my life. Up until the self portraits, I hated the way I looked. Believed that I was not attractive and that I was incapable of having a good photo made. This is when my eyes were starting to open that maybe I had believed lies my whole life.”
Find more from Carrie at her blog or flickr.
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Broken Light Collective 
Great photo!
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I can’t seem to put my finger on why this picture jumps out at me, but i have to say it is very well taken and I hope to see more like it. 🙂
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This photo makes a statement. The placement of your hands and your eyes…well, they say so much. Thank you for sharing.
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Beautiful image of you. You are such an inspiration!
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Lovely image! I particularly like the narrow depth of field with the focus on the one eye.
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Stunning, powerful, imaginative, personal and strong with a hint of hope. Incredible!
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As an art therapist, I am always interested to find people who spontaneously use art for healing. I am so happy to hear that Carrie found relief, and I hope that the two of you here are inspiring others to use art in the same way. That gaze is piercing. It’s striking too how beautiful human emotion is – whatever the emotion.
Thank you so much for sharing this.
Amy
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