Dola Posh: ‘I wasn’t me anymore’

Dora Posh has multiple identities. Photographer. Female; Nigerian. Mother; British.

But after giving birth, she became unsure of who she was.

Six days after her daughter was born, she was lying in a hospital bed in England in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown.

She worried about how her life had changed and whether she would be able to take the pictures she loved so much.

Unable to visit, her relatives kept calling to check on her and the baby. After a difficult pregnancy, Dora was feeling the pressure.

Her mother was thousands of miles away, in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, where she had left two years earlier.

All of this put her “brain in a very dark place…I thought, ‘I’m me, I’m me.'” Even though the baby is out, I’m still It’s me. ”But no, I wasn’t me anymore. ”

Loss of identity may be one of the causes of postpartum depression, which particularly affects Black women. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, Dora was struggling with this.

As soon as she was released from the hospital, she started being bombarded with unsolicited advice.

“There were too many conversations and too much control about how we should raise our children. In a way, it affected my mind as well. I didn’t know what I was doing. I felt like I wasn’t given the chance to be a mother.”

There’s a realness to the way the 33-year-old talks about the events of 2020. This time I held back my tears, but I cried many times.

One night, exhausted from lack of sleep and feeling zombie-like from the loneliness and banality of her new existence, a voice in her head tells her to take her own life.

Emotionally shaken, she clung to the blanket as if it were a life jacket. Her baby girl — Monioluwa, which means “I have God” in Yoruba — was by her side. She sang songs from home.

She then called the health visitor in the middle of the night, and luckily the visitor answered the phone and agreed to visit.

“I buried my head in shame. I felt so ashamed because I felt like I wasn’t even a good mother. I didn’t have the strength to be a mother.”

Dora was persuaded to see a therapist, who recommended using cameras as a way to deal with her emotions.

She learned the craft in Nigeria for a degree in marine biology and stood out from the crowd with her golden-dyed hair and pink boots.

Dora began to make a name for herself in the male-dominated world of fashion and celebrity photography in Lagos. However, she was drawn to portraiture because it allows her to document people’s lives and encourages her subjects to share something deeper.

For therapy, she turned the lens on herself, controlled the camera remotely using an app on her phone, and began compiling a portfolio of shots with Monioluwa.

Mother and child portraits are based on representations of the Virgin and Child and are one of the fundamental motifs of the Western art tradition.

Dora’s photo falls into this mode, but at first the connection was unconscious and it took a mentor to point it out.

She grew up in a pious family, her father being a bishop in the Nigerian church. Pictures of Mary and Jesus adorned the walls of her home, and images of mothers and children appeared in the Bible and hymn books.

“The colors: green, red, gold. The gold frames and the glow of the lights were all in my subconscious because I grew up in that environment.”

All of this manifested itself in the way she composed and lit her portraits.

“Sometimes you do something without even knowing why you’re doing it, but when you sit and reflect on it, you’re like, ‘Ah!’

The veil, or head covering, which was once part of the church uniform, also became an essential element of her work.

“When I put on the veil, I didn’t feel like an empty person anymore. I felt more like myself…I felt like I was reconnecting with my family, I felt like I had the essence of my family. ”

This project began to help Dora better understand her emotions.

When she started sharing her story, she said, “Motherhood wasn’t all joy, and knowing that I suffered from postpartum depression opened the door for me to no longer feel shame.” “I opened it,” he says.

“Right now I’m starting to work on the story of what really happened and how it came out of the darkness, and I’m trying to express that through film.”

Earlier this year, Dora received an award from camera manufacturer Leica for continuing the series and encouraging more women, especially black women, to break the stigma surrounding postpartum depression.

“I want a world where black mothers don’t have to carry so much weight and feel like they have to go through that journey alone. And I want to see a world where black mothers don’t feel like they have to go through that journey alone, and they look at the media and try to make things work. I want people to see themselves as they are.”

In the UK, black women are more likely to experience postnatal depression than other women; The Mental Health Foundation charity says. Although the reasons are complex, Dora believes more openness is essential to addressing this issue.

“This is the first time a woman has stood there and said, ‘I almost ended my life, and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m still an artist, I’m still a woman, and I have something to say. ”

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