The first large scale project to focus on ME
Documentary film maker and photographer Jeremy Jeffs spent three years photographing and interviewing people with ME in their homes. Lives We Cannot Live reveals the hidden reality of living with the condition.
Curated by Sebah Chaudhry and supported by the ME Association, the exhibition sets out to bring visibility to a hidden and neglected community and encompasses environmental portraits, collaged with diary notes and personal memories of before being ill, selected from more than 50 cases.
Diagnosed with ME as a teenager, Jeffs shares the lived experiences of his sitters and captures an intimate side of life rarely witnessed even by close friends. Hidden symptoms mixed with a general lack of awareness make this a doubly invisible and isolating disease.
“I started this project out of frustration and anger because in the almost four decades since my diagnosis nothing has really changed. We still don’t know much about ME, there’s still a lack of proper funding for research, no clear treatment, and worse, there’s still widespread misunderstanding about the illness, even among some healthcare professionals.”
Around 400,000 people in the UK have this debilitating and as yet incurable illness. Symptoms include profound fatigue, sleep disturbance, post-exertional malaise, cognitive difficulties and a range of other symptoms like pain, headaches, nausea and intolerance to lights and noise.
Lives We Cannot Live is the first large scale project to focus on ME and precedes the publication of a photo book with Fistful of Books later this year.
Jeff’s work has been shown at the V&A, The National Film Theatre and The London LGBT Film Festival.
Oxo Tower Gallery, Bargehouse Street, London SE1 9PH from 24th – 28th September. Free Admission.
