Kathryn Chapman: Love and Connection
Last year, we hosted an All Day Communion with lots of wonderful guest speakers. We had some of these talks transcribed and published in our first ever newspaper, which celebrated one whole year of Communion. 100% of the proceeds from the paper go to Papyrus UK, a charity that works hard to prevent young suicide in the UK. You can buy the paper here, and listen to all of our previous guest talks here.
We know that watching videos and buying publications isn’t always accessible to everyone, so we thought we’d put the transcribed talks up on the blog too. We hope you enjoy them.
Kathryn is one of the warmest, most empathetic and kindest people I've spent time with, and I only know Kathryn because I know her husband, Steve, who is also all of those things. Kathryn is here today because she will inspire and lift you up. Kathryn, what I love about Instagram, and I love about you and Steve in particular, is that the window that you open is honest, real and it isn't manicured.
Thank you so much. I think when people ask me to describe myself I often say “not very polished”. I'm not. I'm not somebody who slaps on filters or pretends to be anything other than who I am. I spent 46 years of my life trying to be what I thought I needed to be and I've given up now. I try and keep it real, try and be honest and give other people permission to share where they're at and be honest too, because that sharing is so important. We're all just winging it aren't we? I do find it hilarious when somebody asks me “where did you train to be a photographer?” or “how do you know what to say to somebody during your work?” and I'm like well I'm an empath and I wing it. People are often quite taken aback about that and they go “yeah, I wing it too! Are we allowed to say that?” Winging it is how we allow ourselves to bring in new experiences.
I've got a first class degree with honours in winging it. I've actually learned to wing it more than I've learned anything else but Kathryn, tell me about yourself.
I am 48 and a mum of one. I've been a photographer for 13 years. I started when I was off on mat leave with my daughter and it's something I've always wanted to do. The day I started calling myself a photographer, I couldn't quite believe it, my dream had come true. I've been winging my photography journey ever since and I love it because there's always something new to learn. You are never the same photographer you were from your last shoot. There's always something new to find out about yourself, and other people, and new things to try. I love the fact that it's constant experimentation and I use that as part of my mental health self care as well. I experiment with the possibilities of what can be.
There's a real joy when you said “the day I called myself myself as a photographer, all my dreams had come true”. Let’s go back, what did your childhood sound like, smell like and taste like?
I've been dreading you asking me this because when I think back to my childhood, I don't think back to happy memories. I'm sure there were happy times but my memory doesn't seem to be rooted in happiness. Which is quite hard really and I do know I'm not alone, but it can make me feel quite lonely. My childhood was doing as I was told and avoiding being smacked. I always felt like an outsider cos the rest of my family were scientists. I found childhood quite difficult actually. It's difficult to even verbalise that. I was a very anxious child. My Mum told me that I used to scream when she left the room. She was only in labour with me for half an hour, so I think in a small way that contributed to my separation anxiety when I was little.
My first music album was a really bad cover version of the soundtrack to Grease. I listened to a lot of Erasure and Kate Bush and Tori Amos so I kind of escaped into music quite a lot. I did laugh a lot at school actually. I went back to my school a few years ago, to do some work there. I was quite nervous about going back. I peered in through one of the windows in a room I used to do geography in, and another where I did French, and my overriding memory was laughing with my mates so that was really nice. I had a lovely escape at school from a lot of my anxiety, I did laugh a lot.
The whole idea of school as an escape, that's really unusual. It's normally the other way round. Do you still see your best school friends? Do you still talk to them?
I do yeah, I have one particularly good friend who I still see. She’s amazing. I met her in fifth form when she joined the school and she’s still a great friend. It’s lovely to have friends that are 30 years old because there’s so much that you don’t have to say. There's so much that you get about each other. Those are very precious friendships.
Did you go to University, did you go straight to work, what was your next step from school? What was your escape from living at home, how did you manage to leave?
I failed two of my A levels quite spectacularly and so I retook them. I had a year out, retook them and I got some touch typing qualifications. Then I was a nanny for six months and I lived in, so I'd escape Monday to Friday. I also worked in a pub a couple of evenings a week, so that was another escape as well. I was desperate to get as far from home as possible, but not too far that I couldn't get back within a day, so I went to Newcastle. I grew up in Guildford so I could do it in a day.
Wow, a live in nanny. That's like care squared, isn't it? You're giving a lot when you're doing that. Why did you choose to do that?
I don't really know what my thought process was. I think it was something that was easy, that I could do without much qualification. I could go and have some independence for a few days a week too. It kind of ticked quite a few boxes and I got paid a bit of money. It was like home from home really.
That's a joy. To care, to serve, is a gift that people see the wrong way round. Sometimes they see it as taking from you and often it can give back to you as well.
Yeah. To redo my A levels I went to a crammer in London so I travelled up with a couple of mates that were doing the same thing. We used to get the bus up and get a sausage sandwich on the way in, do our lessons and then come home together. It was quite nice. I did it in three months actually.
And in Newcastle, what did you do your degree in?
Religious studies.
Why did you choose religious studies?
Well, I didn't know what I wanted to do and so I just followed what I was interested in. I was confirmed when I was about 13 and my Dad is now ordained. His elder sister was one of the first women ordained. What amazing day in Southwark Cathedral that was. It just was a natural progression for me to carry on studying. I felt that getting a degree was the right thing to do because that's what I'd been told. I loved it very much, I learnt about all different religions and then I did my dissertation in basically what I ultimately believed in. I used to wrangle quite a lot with all the teachings in the Church of England and what you should and shouldn't do. It just did my head in and just made me more stressed out and I thought, this isn't the religion for me, it's too complicated and I can't apply it to my everyday life. So my dissertation looked at what we absolutely know about Jesus. I boiled it down to three or four things. The first one was that he existed. We can't deny that because there's evidence of him being written about by lots of different people. Number two, he was Jewish. He never came to create a new religion, he was just stirring up the pot and getting people to see things differently. The other thing was that he just wanted people to love each other and be nice to each other. For me it was like well that’s it, that’s my religion right there. I still do go to church and I have a relationship with the universe, with God. But I have to keep it really simple, I cannot live my life by something that is too confusing and where I gotta remember lots of different things. If you come from a place of love, you can’t go far wrong. I try to come from a place of love entirely in everything I do. Love and connection.
That's lovely and you know at the root of it that’s all it is. I can feel that that runs through you and it isn't easy to see in some religions. My parents live in Devon and I love them but my Mum's in some kind of church group, and Dad has had to interrupt them more than once when they've been talking to say “I thought you were supposed to be nice to people, not like anti-immigrant?” Not my Mum, but the people that she's talking to. We do seem to have lost a little bit of love in some religions. Why do you still go to church?
It's part of my self care. I look after my mental health, my physical health and my spiritual health and it's all it's massively part of me feeling whole. When I feel whole I can be my best, I can do my best work, I can serve other people in my best way. Everyone has an opinion on spirituality and religion and all that kind of thing. A big part of it is just making sense of our own journey and our soul and how we feel and where we connect with each other. That's what interests me. For me, life is about connecting with people and spirituality is part of connecting with people in spirit. It doesn't have to be religious, it's just people’s soulfulness and their authenticness. Whenever I have conversations with people I try to challenge myself to ask a really pointed and direct question as quickly as possible to cut through the small talk. The older I get, the more bored I am with small talk. I see how quickly I can ask something like, what makes you angry, makes you tick, lights your fire? Something that gives away your purpose, what gives you great meaning. Those are the kinds of conversations I’m interested in. That’s all about touching people on a more spiritual level and having that connection that we can't put into words.
How does that go down? Do people let you in or are they defensive? How do people deal with that?
I think on the most part people quite like it and are willing to get into deeper conversations cos it's a little bit different. If somebody isn't interested it's very clear and I do get it and then we move on to something very boring and vanilla.
When you left uni, what did you do?
Well I wanted to work in newspapers and write. To be some kind of religious correspondent. I wrote to a couple of papers and one guy wrote back and said I'm afraid enthusiasm isn't enough. So I thought ok I’ll show you. I went and got a job in a newspaper doing promotions, so I kind of got halfway there. I worked at Associated Newspapers which is the Daily Mail. Everyone loves the Daily Mail… Not. We worked across the whole group so it's The Mail on Sunday and Metro, Evening Standard etc. We used to write copy, I used to sign off the front page flashes at the top. I worked very closely with You magazine which was really nice and I was there for a long time, about 10 years. I did love it.I had a break for a couple years and went back and I saw the same people in the corridor. They didn't say “welcome back Kath”, they went “alright Kath?” like I'd never gone away. There was a real sense of feeling at home there. We got champagne every week, everyone got hammered.
But my God you worked hard. I would easily do 11 hour days. I remember Steve sitting in the pub downstairs from the office waiting for me and saying “shall get you a drink?” “Not yet still signing off the page.” And in the end he went home because it was so late. That was pretty frustrating but it was definitely work hard play hard, and I learned a lot there. Learning how to write copy serves me very well for my business now.
Two questions: when did you find who you were, and how did you find Steve?
I found myself through a self portrait that I did on April 18th 2018. Until that point I wasn’t clear who I was. I suffered with depression and anxiety my whole life and following my suicide attempt in my early 20s, I started this 25 year journey in and out of talking therapy and it never never really worked. It worked for a bit and then I would stop and start it again and I got to the point where I thought something was wrong with me. I got knocked off my bike a couple of years prior to this shoot in 2018, and it threw me into a massive depression. I decided to sort myself out one thing at a time. I started with my drinking and that was actually quite inspired. because I knew I'd been drinking too much, I’d been drinking every day. Having a day off was really difficult. After tackling that, the layers started to peel away properly and stuff came out. Loads of stuff I’d buried and been self medicating with alcohol. I had a really great lady that I was working with and she became the first really good therapist I had. I would say a throwaway comment and she would go “hang on a minute, you just said that... tell me more about that.” I've never been asked those types of questions before and it was really revelatory to me. I had her for a year then I had another lady for a year and by the time that came to an end I was absolutely exhausted, so tired of talking. I didn't want to do it anymore, but I wanted to continue working on myself.
I had this idea in my head for a self portrait shoot and it just wouldn't go away. So I knew I had to do it. I decided to look myself in the eye, to see if how I was feeling was really as bad as it felt. I was always comparing myself to other people and thinking they had it worse than me. I thought I didn't deserve to feel like I did. That kind of thing isn't helpful. I had to learn to honour who I was and validate my own feelings. Everyone experiences things differently. I bought some barbed wire, wrapped that round my head, got some theatrical blood, chucked that on. I sat with my most difficult emotions and I photographed what was there. It wasn't an easy process but ultimately it was the most transformational thing I did for my mental health ever. I felt so good with what the images did for me. I saw this woman looking back at me who was in pain and agony and desperate for someone to look after her, and I realised that in those moments, the only person that could do that for her was me. The images became a catalyst for my self care, I didn't know how to love myself before them. Then I started thinking… Maybe this is something I can offer other women? And that’s what I spent 2019 doing. It’s extraordinary really, that I did that for myself and now I help other women to do it.
One of the things I love about it is that it's a gradual process, you see your pictures and you start to process what you've seen. It's a whole body thing and it takes time for it all to sink in. I didn't look at mine again for six months - I looked at them after the shoot and then put them away. By the time I looked at them again, I realised what had been going on. The whole process just was so organic that I didn't really make any effort to look after myself, but it was easy to do because it was just eternally sinking in that I needed to do that. If we are crying, and we look in the mirror - we don't stop and look at ourselves and study our faces to realise that even when we’re upset we’re still moving and breathing and things are changing. When you have a picture, caught in a moment, you cannot deny what's going on there in the image. You can sit with that and you can discover so much about yourself. I saw things in myself that I've never seen before; strength, vulnerability, courage, resilience. There's something very powerful about having photographs of those moments. When you look in the mirror you look away and the moment is gone. Photographs you can come back to time and time again and there is always more to learn.
Do you have the same skill when you take photographs of other people? Can you see through them into other parts of themselves that they don't have access to?
Absolutely and that's why I do it. I can see at the time what's going on and when we look through the gallery together that's what I'm showing them. I'm showing them what they don't see or can't see about themselves. I'll always ask them which picture makes you feel the most uncomfortable. We talk about that one, because that is where the good stuff is. I know that she'll say what she sees, and then I'll say, “how about looking at it from this angle? I see this in your eyes, can you see that? Can you see how your face is, where your eyes are, where your hands are? What do you think you're gazing off into the distance or you're crying for?” And then I say, “What do you want to say to that person? What do you want to do to her? How do you feel about her?” And it's a completely different way of looking at yourself and it's very revealing, because we often don't know these things about ourselves. The same thing applies when you have it in an image, you can't deny it. I could say things to you, but you can just dismiss them. But if I hold up a picture and say this is what I see, and show you, then you have to sit with that.
There's extra magic as well. After the gallery viewing, then I work with my clients to start their self care plan. It’s always very easy stuff because I'm inherently extremely lazy - if I have to make too much effort to do some exercise, I won't bother doing it. So it's about adding tiny things into their daily lives that will start to make a difference, and using the pictures as an anchor for why they should do them. Clients have access to their gallery, but they often don't look at them at all. So I have another gallery viewing with them about four or five months after the shoot. The point of that is to see how their opinion on their images has changed following this new self care regime that they’ve put in place. One of my favourite moments I think, was one lady who hated her gallery - which is quite unusual - she just couldn't see past her appearance, I think. I did a second gallery viewing with her, she was dreading it. Dreading looking at her own photographs. We did a slideshow of them and then we started talking and I said, “how do you feel about your images now?” And she said, “I don't hate them, I can see myself now. I feel sorry for myself. I really actually quite like them now.” We both burst into tears. That’s why I do the work I do. Another thing for me, is that we work on ourselves constantly. We don't realise that though, until we have that time to reflect back and actually consider what's changed. We don't often see it, and it's really really important to acknowledge. I am still processing my first gallery from 3 years ago, I still look at the photos and get loads out of them. They are an anchor point for me, of when things started to get better. I refuse to let go of that woman in the pictures. She was extraordinary in doing what she did and I love her so much for doing that and giving me what she's given me. For me it’s a very long ongoing process, having this incredible bank of images to remind myself of what I need to do to look after myself.