What does pain look like?

Hildegard von Bingen, detail from Scivias (11th century migraine art)


Oliver Sacks, Patterns (from Migraine series, 1970's)


Sarah Raphael, Figure 2 (from "Strip!", paintings illustrating her headaches, 1990's)


"There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness...
Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, the raptures of transcendentalism. The public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it- wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks. It invests certain faces with divinity, sets us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, and wreathes the face of the absent... with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor taste in health. Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest girl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and the language runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and taking his pain in one hand and lump of pure sound in the other, so to crush them together that a brand new word drops out. Probably it will be something laughable."
-Virgina Woolf, excerpt from On Being Ill


Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

-Emily Dickinson Mystery of Pain


The above may not be photographs, but are influences and representations on headache pain and illness as illustrated in art and writing. There are no photographs I relate to in the least on regards of headache pain or chronic pain. Oh chronic pain, you are too hard to get across in such a medium. Let me tackle you!

I've been writing a lot, a lot of which is just rambling and makes no sense to the reader I'm sure- so I decline to post any of it. I've been struggling with this idea of my invisible and chronic pains. This thought of visualizing it photographically. People paint in regards to headache all the time, people even create photographs on the topic- but I barely relate to it directly (in the sense that I would want my work to at all achieve what it does), it's all about "migraine". I do not have a migraine. Millions of people have pains everyday that barely get a diagnosis, pains that people cannot fathom so they write them off, pains that are entirely invisible to another perception, another face.

This is the struggle of making this not only relay what pain can look like, but making people listen, raising an awareness and a bit of understanding.

So many words, but I'm too exhausted to type anymore of these half-feelings and aggravations.