Project HOPE is a non profit photography project to create awareness in Mental Health again and raise donations for the Mental Health Foundation. On Project HOPE, I photograph dancers in lockdown. It is in a way, a documentary project, but I also want to create a positive perception to the situation we are in. There is always hope. There is always a joy in life. So I thought photographing dancers would fit perfectly in presenting this.

As a photographer, dance doesn't only fulfil an artistic expectation, but also gives me hope to overcome challenges that tie us down. It is fascinating to witness how the hard work of a dancer results with such an elegant and flowing outcome. In that point, Project HOPE, unites with the positive perception of the dancer, who overcomes the struggles and speaks out in a universal language of joy. Space and time doesn't matter. While dance itself evokes freedom, dancer is the hope. 

When we feel alone, and facing our struggles, I believe that the dancer can inspire us to progress. I'm trying to express this with the photographs in this project. 

The project started with photographing junior dancers in front of their homes during lockdown, and continued with photographing senior and professional dancers at different outdoor locations in Cheshire and Manchester.

Why mental health?

Like everyone, I had lots of plans and hopes for 2020. But we all found ourselves in this unusually hard situation that we couldn't have imagined. "Fear" suddenly became the main actor in our lives. Fear for our health, fear for our financial status, fear for the future... Fear for not being able to see our loved ones again. Besides the physical health issues the COVID-19 pandemic has created, our mental health is also being threatened. People already struggling with mental health issues, found themselves having to deal with this new stress of the lockdown.  Including the youngsters. As a business owner, I'm used to the mood rollercoaster, but while in the lockdown and the uncertainty for the future, it got worse and hard to manage sometimes. 

Relying on complex social interactions has been a vital part of our evolution and forms our bases as a society. With social distancing, we are protecting lives and avoiding the spread of COVID-19. On the other hand, this also left most of us to deal with the strong emotions, overwhelming fear and anxiety alone during this pandemic. 

Coping with stress in a healthy way will make us stronger as a community for sure. As we witnessed, people try to find different ways to cope with this pandemic. And the best ones are, when other people are involved as a community. Remember how it melted our hearts, when people first started singing on their balconies in Italy. 

On this non profit photography project Project HOPE, I am finding my way to cope with the pandemic stress by photographing dancers. But it's not only me. The dancers I've been photographing, including the junior ones, were all found to breathe fresh air in this project. 

But, since I've started Project HOPE, I realised one more time that talking about mental health is still a kind of taboo in society. Although anyone can be affected and anyone can feel lonely and struggle with finding a way out. That's why, in this project I'm photographing dancers. 

I've learned a lot, and I've remembered a lot since then. I've realised how I had forgotten my old ways to deal with struggles. "I always find a way" used to be my motto though, but for a reason, it left its place to worry and pessimistic in the last few years. Now, while photographing dancers, I also discovered new ways to connect with my "real" self.