The Photographer Of Hope

“I was 15 years old and I had a happy life, but I felt different to the rest of my friends, as though I didn’t belong anywhere”, Aamod Korhonen begins. “I felt that I couldn’t share my deepest feelings with anyone else. Until one day alcohol became my ally. I started drinking from a very young age. When I was drunk, I felt at peace. I was just a teenager when I tried to commit suicide for the first time”, he recounts.

At the age of 20 he was diagnosed with severe depression and since then not a drop of alcohol has passed his lips. Although during the thirty years following the diagnosis there has been no shortage of panic attacks, social isolation and the general suffering inherent in life itself.

But in the midst of so much darkness, Aamod wanted to go towards the light, practising Aikido, learning to control his breathing and attending more than a thousand Narcotics Anonymous meetings. “I have never needed to hide anything and I am not ashamed of my mental health”, he says.

Aamod is someone with a gaze that reaches your soul. He defines himself as an artistic photographer, although first and foremost he is an apprentice and a fierce defender of communicating feelings, capable of reading facial expressions, identifying pain and knowing how to accompany it. “Every time I meet people with mental health problems and we explain our experiences, a connection is formed on a very profound level”, he says. Like the day when he met a friend of his son’s, aged 15, who tried to commit suicide. “I talked to him, he opened up to me and a little later he confessed that that conversation had saved his life”. [...]

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