The Divided Heart Doesn't Know Whether To Break Or Mend
A photography project by Matthew Poburyny
“The divided heart doesn’t know whether to break or mend is a projection of my uncertainties about my (and humanity’s) future during the early stages of a midlife crisis.
Emotionally divided about where and what I was supposed to be doing with my life, I found myself walking along the service roads of the trench highway I lived directly next to in Montreal’s west end.
Frustrated and suffocated in my own thoughts, I wandered the noisy sidewalks from one end of the highway to the other, thinking about the social and engineering problems in the area, which ranged from gentrification, poor city planning, decaying infrastructure, air pollution and no access to green spaces.
I didn’t realize that I was photographing my inner claustrophobic state of mind, in which I felt trapped by every aspect of the life I had built for myself up until that point.
After moving to another country not long after doing the work, I could objectively view the images and my feelings of inadequacy, fragility, insecurity, and vulnerability.
The project aims to connect the inner and outer worlds during a turbulent time in my life, and I believe the photos can serve as a gateway to mental health conversations.”
That’s it for this newsletter!
If you have any suggestions for interviews, features, topics, interesting work or photo books that I should check out, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or reach out!
Stay safe and keep shooting.
Kim
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I resonate with this as I seem to be in a similar state of trying to figure out who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing now. My context is that I'm recently a widower and my life was centered (for the past three years) around caregiving. Now that my wife is gone, I'm trying to figure out who Antonio is without being part of a married system any more. My photography these days feels like a search as well since I connect part of my being as being a photographer. I guess that's one of the things a camera can be good for: searching for ourselves.
I know you say "claustrophobic" -- I can't argue with you, you know yourself. The images to me don't feel claustrophobic. But They certainly feel "neglected," "broken," "amiss", "discarded".
Thank you for sharing. Hope to see more.