Story & Photos by Jim Rice

When my mother was shot to death at age 31, she was still a young mother, a brilliant photographer, stunningly beautiful, and funny. Yet she was gone in the flash of shotgun blast, from the hands of a drunken, mentally ill man.
I was a 9-year-old curly-haired little boy, just learning how to make photographs myself,
along with my mother’s help. I said goodbye to her and gave her what would be our last kiss and walked out the front door of our house and down the front steps to the school bus. The shooter was watching me as I boarded the bus. Moments after I gave my mother that kiss, she was dead on our bathroom floor.
About a half-hour later, my grandfather took me out of school and broke the news to me.
In the ensuing minutes, my brain began to shut down. I couldn’t remember the sound of my mother’s voice. I had not only lost her physically, but I could feel the memories of her slipping away, like the tide moving away from a beach. My secret partner was moving into the spaces in my brain where my mother used to be. That secret partner didn’t have a name back in 1961, but now it does – PTSD. That secret partner of mine literally sucked the life out of me for the next 40 years and changed who I was as a human being.
About 60 years after this horrific event, I published a photo essay, aptly titled “Shooting”.
The book chronicled my life with PTSD before anyone knew about PTSD. The book
was written without any understanding on my part of neuroscience or the more recent discoveries in the neuroarts community. The book was a story told with words and photographs. I had not seriously used a camera for 40 years after my mother’s murder.
At age 49, a mental health counselor had challenged me to pick up a camera again.
And when I did, to my surprise, I began to have flashbacks of my mother, as if I was meeting her and getting to know her again. I kept photographing for the next 20 years and the memories grew stronger. It was astounding and perplexing how this was
happening. So, I decided to tell the story of how the shooting of gun had nearly
destroyed me, but how the shooting of a camera had given me a new life. Fast forward, and a doctor with an understanding of neuroscience reached out to me about my experiences, and the rest is, as they say, history.
There is a good chance if you are reading this either you or someone you know has a secret partner. The same secret partner I had. PTSD is very sly and has many faces. PTSD can burrow down deep enough into you that those around you can’t see it, and it
can even hide from you. PTSD tricks you into “you don’t know what you don’t know”.
For 40 years I was very difficult to live with. I reacted to triggering events with inappropriate responses, often with anger, or by fleeing a discussion. It was the classic “fight or flight” response that happens when your trauma is triggered, but when you’re
under the spell of your secret partner you don’t realize what’s going on – you don’t know what you don’t know.
What I needed more than anything in those decades when I was lost was hope. The world is full of people of all ages who have experienced trauma or will experience trauma. How will they find hope in their struggle to get through another day? When
they struggle for healing and normalcy?
The neuroarts community is beginning to be recognized as a source of hope for those
who have suffered trauma and live with PTSD. One of the underrecognized modalities in the neuroarts community is photography. At Fotophase, our intent is to merge photography with neuroscience in such a way that we offer hope to those impacted by trauma who feel like they have no hope. A camera and a photograph are like a lock and a key. Put them together and they can open doors. Inside that once-locked door, there
just may be hope waiting for you.

– Jim Rice