Why am I sad? Dana Stirling’s new photobook is a vulnerable search for meaning

Still life isn’t typically a photographic format you’d turn to when wanting to conveying complex emotions. It can often feel as though a human presence is necessary to communicate any personal feelings in photographic form. But with Dana Stirling’s work, this isn’t necessarily the case. For the artist, photography has been a way of “navigating identity, family dynamics, and personal history”, and she’s always found herself turning to the still life form as an effective means to grapple with them.

“Even when I believed I was making work detached from my own experiences, I now see how deeply rooted it was in these themes. My artistic process has always been guided by a search for meaning in places and objects that might otherwise be overlooked, transforming them into something significant through the act of photographing them”, she shares. Dana’s recent photobook Why Am I Sad, published by Kehrer Verlag, is a more vulnerable exploration of these themes, uncovered from a deeply personal place that the artist has been “circling around for years”, she says. The publication is formed around several years of image making, a period of time that allowed Dana to question her relationship to sadness.

From a young age the photographer was witness to her mothers battle with clinical depression, “growing up in that environment shaped me in ways I am still unpacking," she shares. “There was always this underlying sadness, an emotional weight that I carried without fully understanding its impact.”

Photography became a tool to work out whether this sadness was ever something she could separate herself from or if it was “simply part of who I am”, she says. This journey saw Dana create a series of still life images that sought to mirror her internal emotional state, documenting objects that held symbolic weight: empty landscapes, faulty signs and artificial smiles among other observations – things plucked from the everyday that feel somewhat heavy, even to the untrained eye.

Some of these images were captured across roads in the US during visits, while others were taken in the photographers family home, “reinforcing the idea that sadness isn’t always loud or external – it often lingers in the quiet, familiar spaces of our everyday lives”, she says. Although classic imprints of America linger in the images, the series isn’t about any one place. For Dana the locations are arbitrary, “for me, the images could be taken anywhere”, she says, these moments were simply captured by chance – serendipitous encounters in which she was pulled in by a particular object or scene that lead to “quiet personal discoveries”.

The series draws parallels to the Dana’s former photo documentary series Dead Water, in which the photographer turned her lens to an abandoned waterpark, freezing a forgotten, deserted place in her frames. What might tie these two bodies of work together is: “the instinct to find meaning in sadness, to reclaim and reinterpret spaces that are neither traditionally beautiful nor conventionally photogenic, and to impose a sense of ownership and understanding,” Dana says.

What matters most across all of Dana’s work is the act of witnessing, the kind of presence that allows you to stumble upon all kinds of visual treasures in the most unexpected of places. Images waiting to be taken that aren’t just a coincidence, but a puzzle of fate – a product of being wherever we are, at a specific moment: at the side of a road, waiting at the gas station, passing through a park. The photographer takes things that are sure to be missed or forgotten and finds a way to hold on to their sadness, to connect it to universal human emotions.

Aiming to open up a conversation around mental health, “something that so many artists struggle with”, Why Am I Sad is about searching for meaning and connection, “for ways to navigate the weight of our inner worlds”, Dana shares. Rather than offering resolution the photobook is simply “an acknowledgment that sadness exists, that it shapes us, and that it deserves to be seen and spoken about. In a world that often encourages us to hide or minimize these emotions, I wanted to create a space where they could be held with care, curiosity, and even a sense of beauty”, Dana ends.