Courtesy of Lorie Novak
Fast Forward recently created an online gallery of images from Professor Lorie Novak's Migraine Register. Since 2009, Prof. Novak has been making photographic self-portraits every time she has a migraine attack. Says Prof. Novak in the project description:
I am one of more than 1 billion people worldwide who suffer from migraines. My migraines began when I was 8 years old, and when I was a young girl, I was told I worked too hard and worried too much, as if that explained away my pain. So, I hid my invisible illness, but no more... With my self-portraits, I honor the long history of anonymous women who suffered in silence from migraine and other invisible conditions, were not believed, were told they were too emotional, or were committed to institutions.
Lorie Novak’s photographs, installations, and Internet projects explore issues of memory and transmission, the relationship between the intimate and the public, and the shifting cultural meanings of photographs. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and her photographs are in many museum permanent collections. Awards include artist residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Bogliasco Foundation, ArtSway, and The MacDowell Colony. Her web project collectedvisions.net, 1996-present, exploring how family photographs shape our memory was one of the earliest interactive storytelling sites. She is Professor of Photography & Imaging at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she is also the founder and director of Future Imagemakers a social practice project offering free photography classes to NYC high school students.
Fast Forward is a research project concerned with women in photography based at University for the Creative Arts in London. Started in 2014, the project highlights the work of women photographers and questions the way that the established canons have been formed.