A Series Of Sad Women

Photographs by Patrick Women.

One day I met a woman who looked sad. I asked her why she looked so sad and she told me a sad story about recent events in her life.

Her story touched me and I asked if I could photograph her face and she said that I could. That was the beginning and inspiration for this exhibition.

I never thought to ask myself how I recognised that it was sadness she was feeling and not unhappiness or depression. On reflection I realised that we are very good at recognising the emotional state of others, we have some inbuilt skill whose mechanism is exact and largely unknown.

We see other’s faces all the time but seldom do we see our own. Do we too, carry our emotions on our faces like a billboard for all to see? I guess we do.

Of all these photos only one is a genuine sad photo.

The others are of women that I asked to look sad so I could photograph them. Although that may seem staged and false, to able to look sad you have to have experienced sadness and being able to recall that emotion is to relive it albeit briefly.

The images are large because I wanted the feeling of sadness in the photos to dominate the exhibition.

Sadness is not unhappiness.

The closest I got to working out the difference between sadness and unhappiness is that sadness comes from losing something that we have and unhappiness comes from not getting something that we want.

Sadness is soft, it wraps around us like a scarf in the winter of our loss. Unhappiness is a large heavy box that we have to drag with us everywhere we go.