Photography and Mental Health: Louis Quail and Daniel Regan

Mental health is one of the hardest subjects in documentary photography, because the people most often pictured have the least control over how they are pictured. Two British photographers, Louis Quail and Daniel Regan, have built long bodies of work in that territory from very different positions: Quail from inside his own family, Regan from his own experience and from a decade of organising support for other artists. This article describes their projects and the working methods behind them.

Louis Quail and Big Brother

Louis Quail describes himself on his own site as a documentary photographer exploring social and aesthetic issues. His best known work is Big Brother, a long project about his older brother Justin, who has schizophrenia. In his introduction to the work, Quail describes it as follows.

An intimate photographic portrayal of my brother, Justin's struggle with schizophrenia.

In the same introduction on louisquail.com, he sets out what the work is trying to do: to fight stigma and to share Justin's story so that people can understand, empathise and celebrate him, while also showing the strain on the system that is meant to provide care.

The structural decision that makes the project unusual is that Justin is not reduced to a diagnosis. The work gives as much room to his painting, his poetry, his birdwatching and his long relationship with his girlfriend Jackie as it does to episodes of illness. The book of the project, published by Dewi Lewis, runs to 196 pages with a further 36 pages of inserts and a 16 page booklet, and it sets photographs alongside extensive texts, medical reports, police records and Justin's own notebooks. The ISBN is 978-1-911306-31-3.

That mixture of document types matters. A photograph of a person in distress can be read almost any way a viewer likes. A photograph placed next to a medical record, a poem by the person photographed and a caption written by their brother is much harder to misread. Quail's site lists the project as a series winner at the Renaissance Photography Prize in 2017, shortlisted for the Arles book and text award in 2018, and shortlisted for the Wellcome Photography Prize in 2019.

Daniel Regan and the Arts and Health Hub

Daniel Regan works across two roles that inform each other. On his own site he describes himself as a visual artist and creative health consultant based in London, with more than twenty years spent exploring complex emotional experiences through the arts, and themes including disability, heritage, belonging and what it means to be human. He describes himself as queer, disabled and neurodivergent, and of mixed heritage. His listed clients include the Barbican Centre, the British Library, Wellcome Collection, NHS England and King's College London.

His second role is organisational. Regan founded the Arts and Health Hub in 2015. It is a London based not for profit community interest company supporting artists and creatives whose practice explores health and wellbeing, and it runs peer support groups online and in person, workshops, exhibitions and training for organisations working with artists in the arts and health sector.

The distinction between the two roles is worth noticing, because the second one addresses a problem the first one creates. Making work about your own health, or about someone close to you, is sustained labour with no obvious end point and very little professional infrastructure around it. Peer groups and practitioner support are an answer to that specific gap rather than a general good.

What the two approaches have in common

Neither project is reportage in the conventional sense. Both are built over years rather than assignments, both involve the photographer's own life, and both treat the subject as a collaborator with a say in the result. Several practical features follow from that.

• Time. Long projects allow the ordinary parts of a life to appear. A short commission tends to collect only the visible signs of illness, because those are what a day of shooting produces.
• The subject's own material. Quail's book includes Justin's art and writing. Regan has worked with his own records and his own images. Letting the subject speak in their own medium changes the authority of the work.
• Context documents. Reports, letters and notebooks anchor a picture to a date and a fact, which limits how far a viewer can project onto it.
• Consent as a process. With work made over years, consent is revisited rather than signed once at the start.

Where this work is shown and collected

There is an established institutional context in Britain for art made in and around health. Bethlem Gallery is a free to enter gallery and registered charity established in 1997, sited on the grounds of the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Beckenham in south east London. Wellcome Collection in London collects and exhibits material at the intersection of medicine and life, and appears among Regan's listed clients. The Wellcome Photography Prize, for which Quail's work was shortlisted in 2019, is one of the few photography awards built around health subjects.

For readers coming to this subject as photographers rather than as viewers, the most useful thing in both practices is the refusal to make a single picture carry the whole story. The work is assembled, slowly, out of many kinds of evidence.

A note on what this page is

This article describes photographic projects and the way they were made. It is not medical information, it offers no guidance on diagnosis or treatment, and nothing on this page is written or reviewed by a clinician. In the UK, information about mental health conditions, services and support lines is published by the charity Mind.

Further profiles of documentary photographers are indexed on our speakers page, with the full archive of talk pages under events and previous talks. This page takes its address from a London photography talk listed for 29 May 2018. This site is an independent journal, is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group or with theprintspace, and does not organise events.