In Order To Be Happy, You have to be Sad.

This research publication wasn’t written out of academic obligation — it was born out of a fractured state of trying to survive. By the time I began writing, my reality was already collapsing: my brother - Alexander, had been declared missing in 2008. Years of ambiguous grief, the institutional neglect within the investigation alongside bearing the psychological weight of being one of the two Black women in my course at UAL; I had mentally clocked out months before the deadline. The darkroom, once a space of experimentation and intimacy, had become a cage tainted with test strips that resembled evidence more than art. I wasn’t documenting images... I was documenting my disintegration. 

This work traces two depressive episodes throughout my final academic year, and investigates how the act of image-making — particularly through analogue processes — both reflects and shapes mental health. Photography here is not passive documentation; it is a method of survival, a mirror, a wound, and at times, a weapon. Working from a practice-based, autoethnographic methodology,I bring together personal diary entries, silver gelatin prints, darkroom experiments, and critical theory — including Derrida’s hauntology, Fanon's’ idea of the black ego and Deleuze & Guattari’s (G+D) rhizomatic identity — to interrogate what it means to make art from inside the trauma. This approach echoes Antoine D’Agata’s assertion that “it’s not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It’s their intimate relationship with it” (Magnum Photos). 

Structured in three movements — In Order To Be Happy, You Have To Be Sad, Rhizomes To The Soul, and Ouroboros — this research is not linear, nor resolved. It folds and is consumed by itself. It asks: Can images speak for grief when words fail? What happens when your own body becomes the medium? And what do we risk when we allow ourselves to be truly seen? But most importantly, while standing in the darkroom — hands calloused from submerging them in fixer, through the midst of the red and fumes — I answered the voice that spoke with clarity, not in the usual fragmented whispers, but in a single, devastating command:

 ‘Are you ready to be happy?

"Be happy." (Da’Costa, 2024-2025a, 28th February 2025)