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<h1>jeanine pohlhaus photography,mental health,family photographs,documentary photographer,bi-polar disorder,clinical depression, families love and struggle</h1>
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<h1>biography | jeanine pohlhaus photography,mental health,family photographs,documentary photographer,bi-polar disorder,clinical depression, families love and struggle</h1></span><br>
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When Jeanine Pohlhaus' father fell ill in the mid-'90s, she returned to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to help her parents, Joan and Ernest, through a trying time. As her father's condition worsened, he was diagnosed with bi polar disorder. Pohlhaus resumed her practice of photographing her family, recording the moments and events of her parents' lives.<br />
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Pohlhaus, a documentary photographer, has written that photography, "long a way of capturing ephemeral familial quirkiness, soon took on a different tone, with each family moment depicting how depression overwhelms not only the sufferer, but everyone else in his narrowing world." Photographing her father provided some relief, Pohlhaus found: "The camera gives me momentary distance during a time in which any breathing space proved a luxury."<br />
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Joan Pohlhaus has had a career in social work and education, while Ernest is a religious, emotional man who worked for Pennsylvania's Department of Aging for 27 years. In a sensitive and intimate series of black-and-white photographs, her parents can be witnessed in moments that are ordinary yet touching (Ernest snoozing on an overwhelmingly flowered couch with his dog, Sauza, striking the same pose on the floor), extraordinary and draining (preparation for electroconvulsive therapy). Pohlhaus' photographs evidence compassion and affection, and contribute to a perspective allowing the photographer to confront the depression of a loved one with a tone that is serious yet not overwhelming, and humorous while empathetic.<br />
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As photographer Larry Fink has pointed out, her images produce "an affecting comedy." Fink has thoughtfully commented that Pohlhaus' photographs generate an eccentric and unusual combination of emotive responses - the utmost of compassion mixed with unusual absurdity, eliciting "tears of hilarity and tears of deepest humanity."</p>
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Pohlhaus currently divides her time between her parents' home in Pennsylvania and New York City, where she is a freelance photo editor and photographer. After being sidelined from the Philadelphia Civic Ballet by injury, Pohlhaus enrolled at Temple University to study film and later became interested in still photography. Her work has taken her across the country and to Europe and Asia. She has worked as a photo editor and photographer for Art News, Audubon Magazine, Sipa Press and the Dana Foundation in New York, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California; as photo editor of Swanstock Fine Photography in Tucson, photo curator at Ridgway Gallery in Colorado; and as publications and promotions manager for the Aperture Foundation . Freelance work has taken her to Italy for the Florence Biennale Cine Moda. She has exhibited at the University of Rhode Island, Williamson Gallery, Layfayette College, Browyn Keenan gallery, gallery Sink, and Harrisburg Museum of Art. Pohlhaus’ work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Photo District News, Time Out, George, The Photo Review, Pyschology Today, Foto8, and American Photography among others. Her family project "Close to Home"appeard on PBS tellivision on "EGG" a national program celebrating various art forms. She had the honor of gining a keynote address at the Center in Sante Fe with photographer and her mentor Larry Fink.</p>
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<img alt="" height="191" src="/users/jeaninepohlhaus6547/Image/jen2 copy(1).JPG" width="125" /><br />
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jeanine pohlhaus photographer's ongoing project documenting her fathers struggle with mental illness, declining health and aging.and her mothers fight as a caretaker to keep going.
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