The Crisis Tapes

The Crisis Tapes – the debut monograph of photographer Charlie Simokaitis – is an account of his daughter’s gradual loss of the ability to see, and of her powerful psychological response to an imminent, and presumably diminished, reality. Depression and circular episodes of mental un-wellness pervaded her life for several years, and reverberated within the family, like a reoccurring grieving process. Over time, Simokaitis and his wife found that they had assumed the role of subjective interpreters of the visible world – the descriptions of their surroundings, objects, and phenomena becoming manifestly more exacting and streamlined. While their daughter, retreating from life, sought refuge in a forest of her own making, Simokaitis as photographer drew from the emotionally heightened disorientation, rage and confusion of their everyday life – a life, for his daughter, that was growing narrower by degrees, in which the act of seeing itself was being thoroughly considered.