Brittany Davis

Brittany applied to exhibit her photography at York Hospital. The Arts Team found her story compelling and spoke volumes of how well the arts support wellbeing. We invited her to exhibit alongside Charley Perryn to coincide with Mental Health Awareness Week. All was going well, until we received an email from Britt which read something along the lines of “I think there may have been some confusion. I think I contacted the wrong York hospital. I thought you were in York Maine in USA!” 

So, by some way of compensation we asked Brittany if she would like to appear on our CultureClub.Social website and share her art and her story with us here.

Here is Brittany’s story and I hope you enjoy her photograph.

My name is Brittany and I am a 25 year old hard working, mother, medical assistant and
novice photographer. Right now I work as a Technician in an Ophthalmology office but I am planning on going back to school in the fall of 2022 for my nursing. My long term career goal is to become an RN in the ER.

I didn’t get into photography until only a couple years ago when I became sick. After
days after days in hospitals and doctors offices they diagnosed me with Gastroparesis and Barrett’s Oesophagus with cancerous lesions growing. This made it very difficult and painful to eat which led to me losing 50lbs in the span of 1 month. I fell into depression and anxiety after feeling like nothing was going to help me and that I was the only one who I knew at my age dealing with this.

Photography is the only thing that I have always appreciated and always wanted to get
into but I could never find the time or the money to invest into a real camera. I finally bought my first camera and quickly fell in love with even just going into my backyard and taking pictures of anything I could find. Spending hours immersed in something that wasn’t painful. I realized that photography was my way to escape the real world and just be my age for a minute.

Karl Lagerfeld once said “ What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment
that is gone forever, impossible to reproduce”, and this is something I will love about
photography is that I can go back to a moment that brought me happiness and remember what I was doing and feeling in that moment.