{"id":19076,"date":"2024-12-14T13:39:38","date_gmt":"2024-12-14T13:39:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/dola-posh-i-wasnt-me-anymore\/"},"modified":"2024-12-14T13:39:38","modified_gmt":"2024-12-14T13:39:38","slug":"dola-posh-i-wasnt-me-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/dola-posh-i-wasnt-me-anymore\/","title":{"rendered":"Dola Posh: \u2018I wasn\u2019t me anymore\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\"DolaDola Posh<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
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Dola Posh has multiple identities: Photographer; woman; Nigerian; mother; Briton.<\/p>\n

Yet after giving birth, she no longer felt sure who she was.<\/p>\n

Six days after her daughter was born, she was lying in a bed in an English hospital, in the midst of a covid lockdown.<\/p>\n

She worried about how her life had changed and if she would ever again do what she loved – taking pictures.<\/p>\n

Unable to visit, relatives kept on calling to check up on her and the baby. After a difficult pregnancy, Dola felt under pressure.<\/p>\n

Her mother was thousands of miles away in the place she had left two years earlier \u2013 Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city.<\/p>\n

All this put her \u201cbrain in a very dark place\u2026 I thought: \u2018I\u2019m me; the baby\u2019s out, I\u2019m still me.\u2019 But no, I wasn\u2019t me any more.\u201d<\/p>\n

The loss of identity can be one of the causes of postnatal depression, which disproportionately affects black women. Though she did not recognise it at the time, this was what Dola was suffering from.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"DolaDola Posh<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Dola began to take self-portraits to document her struggle with depression<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
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Once out of hospital, she was almost immediately being bombarded with unsolicited advice. <\/p>\n

There was \u201ctoo much talk, too much control around how I should raise the child. In a way that also affected my mind. It made me feel like I didn\u2019t know what I was doing. I wasn\u2019t given the chance to be a mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a matter-of-factness to the way the 33-year-old speaks about the events of 2020. She resists the tears this time, but she has cried \u2013 a lot.<\/p>\n

One night, worn down from feeling like a zombie, because of a lack of sleep, and the isolation and mundanity of her new existence, a voice in her head told her to take her own life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"DolaDola Posh<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Dola found solace in photography and this first image that she created for the series was when Monioluwa was three months old<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
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Emotionally unmoored, she clung on to her blanket as if it was a life jacket. Her baby girl \u2013 Monioluwa, meaning \u201cI have God\u201d in Yoruba \u2013 was by her side. She sang songs from home.<\/p>\n

She then made a middle-of-the-night call to her health visitor who, fortunately, picked up and agreed to come round.<\/p>\n

\u201cI buried my head in shame, I just felt so much shame because it\u2019s like I\u2019m not even a good mother. I don\u2019t have the strength to be a mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dola was persuaded to see a therapist, who encouraged her to use her camera as a way of dealing with her feelings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"DolaDola Posh<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Monioluwa fell seriously ill when she was nine months old and while looking after her baby, Dola’s anxiety increased – she says her “soul became lost”<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
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Learning the craft in Nigeria, while studying for a marine biology degree, she stood out from the crowd with her dyed-gold hair and pink boots.<\/p>\n

Dola began to build a reputation in Lagos\u2019s male-dominated worlds of fashion and celebrity photography. But she gravitated towards portraiture as it allowed her to document people\u2019s lives and encouraged subjects to share something more profound.<\/p>\n

For the therapy she turned the lens on herself \u2013 and, using an app on her phone to remotely control the camera, began to produce a portfolio of shots of her with Monioluwa.<\/p>\n

The mother-and-baby portrait, drawing on representations of the Madonna and child, is one of the fundamental motifs of the Western art tradition.<\/p>\n

Dola\u2019s photographs fit into this mode but the connection was unconscious at first and it took a mentor to point it out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"DolaDola Posh<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Looking at Monioluwa fast asleep when she was 10 months old, Dola wondered whether she would ever experience such sleep again herself<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
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She was raised in a religious household – her father was a bishop in a Nigerian church. Paintings of Mary and Jesus were on the walls of her home, and the image of the mother and child was in the Bibles and hymn books.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe colours: the green, red and gold; the gold frames and the light glow \u2013 growing up in that environment, it was all there in my subconscious.\u201d<\/p>\n

This all then came out in the way that she composed and lit her portraits.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes you do things, you don\u2019t even know why you do them and then when you sit down and reflect it\u2019s like: \u2018Oh!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The veil, or head covering, that had been part of her church-going uniform, also became an essential element of her work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I put on the veil, it didn\u2019t feel like that empty person any more. It felt more me\u2026 I was reconnecting with my family, it felt like I had their essence with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The project was beginning to help Dola better understand her emotions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"DolaDola Posh<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Dola needed to figure out how to be the best mother she could be, while also working as a professional photographer<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
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She says that when she started sharing her story \u201cthat motherhood was not all joys and I suffered from postnatal depression, that opened a door for me not to have shame any more.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow I am starting to work on the stories of what actually happened and the darkness, how I crawled out of it, and try to depict that through images.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Dola won an award from camera manufacturer Leica to allow her to continue her series and encourage more women \u2013 particularly black women – to break the stigma around postnatal depression.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want a world where black mothers don\u2019t have to carry so much burden and feel like they have to go through that journey alone and I want them to look in the media and see a reflection of themselves trying to make things work.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the UK, black women are more likely to experience postnatal depression than others, the Mental Health Foundation charity says<\/a>. The reasons are complex, but Dola believes that being more open is vital in addressing the issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s new for a woman to stand there and say: \u2018I almost ended my life, I\u2019m not ashamed of it \u2013 I am still an artist, I am still a woman and I have something to say.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"DolaDola Posh<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
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If you feel you have been affected by issues mentioned in this article:<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

You may also be interested in:<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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\"GettyGetty Images\/BBC<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n


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Dola Posh Dola Posh has multiple identities: Photographer; woman; Nigerian; mother; Briton. Yet after giving birth, she no longer felt sure who she was. Six days after her daughter was born, she was lying in a bed in an English hospital, in the midst of a covid lockdown. She worried about how her life had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19078,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19076\/revisions\/19078"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}