‘Taking a big negative, and turning it into a positive’: How UNMASKED is using photography to explore men’s mental health

September is a month dedicated to raising awareness of suicide prevention, encouraging people to talk openly about mental health and seek support when they need it. But talking about mental health can be difficult enough without having to find the words to explain exactly what you are going through.

For photographer Justin Garner and men’s mental health advocate Jordan Egerton, UNMASKED is an attempt to find another way to have those conversations.

The project, at least five years in the making, brings together men with lived experience of mental health struggles, using photography to represent experiences that might otherwise be difficult to communicate verbally.

As a photographer, Justin finds the camera provides a way of expressing those experiences without relying solely on words. As such, Justin has spent the last five years reaching out to men and learning about their struggles:

“My job is to find a way to put that in a picture. They might think, ‘Its hard for me to tell people, or show people how I’m feeling and what’s going on in my head’, and I thought this was a great way of doing it.”

He told me, “Photography is great for being creative and fixing yourself, I think. That’s why I’m a photographer”

For Jordan Egerton, whose work includes a men’s mental health podcast and support group, UNMASKED is an opportunity to take those individual stories and turn them into a wider conversation.

“I learned about the project through Justin and just kind of hijacked it!”, Jordan told me, “He does exhibitions anyway, I have a podcast, so I thought let’s collaborate! Let’s not just do the exhibition, let’s do a panel and a Q&A and we can get people talking and have real conversations.”

The result is a collection of images which approach mental health through real, lived experience rather than statistics and the clinical air that often lingers around mental health discussions.

UNMASKED recently came to the University of Manchester, where the photographs were exhibited alongside a panel discussion and question-and-answer session. But for Justin and Jordan, the exhibition goes deeper than the evening it spends here. They hope the project can help men find different ways of expressing what they are going through, while encouraging conversations that might otherwise never happen.

“Tonight is really the start of UNMASKED, so its not just a one-night event we want to take it into education, and we want to do a book.” Jordan said.

Justin told me the pair have ‘big ambitions’:

“It would be great to take this into another place, somewhere it could be on for longer, and always free so it is accessible to people. Further than that, we’d love to bring this as a community project: working with organisations to have mini-projects just like this that they could showcase.”

Justin said, “My big ambition is to have a book, a coffee-table style book. It’s not a self-help book; it’s for understanding and for people to relate to.”

That ambition reflects the wider purpose of UNMASKED. The photographs are a way into conversations about mental health, rather than an end in themselves. Justin and Jordan’s collaboration has birthed a blend of creativity and community.

For Justin the creative process offers an opportunity to approach experiences that can otherwise be difficult to articulate. While Jordan sees the challenge in turning those individual experiences into something that can help other men recognise that they are not alone.

At its heart, UNMASKED sheds light on struggles that so often go unseen, offering an alternative way to start potentially life saving conversations. Be it though an image on display at the University of Manchester, a story told in the gallery, or the recognition found in seeing that someone else has experienced something similar.

As Justin and Jordan move towards taking UNMASKED into education, communities and beyond, the photographs on display look to become the beginning of a much bigger conversation.