Safi Alia Shabaik
Personality Crash:
Portraits of My Father Who Suffered from Advanced Stages of Parkinson's Disease, Dementia and Sundowners Syndrome
Jun 1 - Jul 1, 2023
Personality Crash: Portraits of My Father Who Suffered from Advanced Stages of Parkinson's Disease, Dementia and Sundowners Syndrome explores the human condition when altered by disease, from an intimate perspective. The work presents my family’s personal story, but also serves as a universal reminder of what it means to be human.
In 2013 and the early stages of his Parkinson’s diagnosis, my father and I agreed to make this body of work as a way to bring us closer together, knowing illness would eventually pull us worlds apart. Our collaboration stemmed from a heartfelt desire to understand disease, mental illness, and loss of self. With my role as documentarian and eventually primary caregiver, we created this work for a handful of years, through compounding afflictions of dementia and sundowners, until his death on January 1, 2018.
Ultimately, Personality Crash is an exploration of loss – my father’s loss of autonomy and self, and my own loss of the father I had known my whole life – but it is also about family bonds and the power of love in the face of adversity. He had been my protector, champion and role model, who seemed indestructible in his daughter’s eyes. As much as it gave me a window into understanding his physical and cognitive changes, this project gave my father strength and resolve. It gave him daily purpose – something to look forward to – and kept him engaged. It came to represent his own survival, though in reality we were chronicling his demise. In his final year, my father had increasing moments of confusion, hallucination, disorientation, and major disconnect from simple instruction and the tactile world around him. My father became my child for whom I cared, protected, and advocated. I literally parented my parent and would go to all ends to guarantee his visibility and dignity in the world.
In retrospect, this project is bigger than either of us, and more than just a bridge between our different realities on the road to my father’s death. The New York Times featured this work, calling it “raw and emotionally fraught” and the photographs themselves “powerful in their honesty.” From the beginning, we agreed to present an honest and vulnerable, compassionate end-of-life story to honor his journey. We wanted to humanize the experience of losing one’s sense of self while aging with disease. Through this collaboration, I came to new understandings of disease and mental illness, distinguishing the disease from the individual, and the process of anticipatory grief. It was an unexpected lesson in learning the depths of my own capacity to love as well as the profundity of my anguish. My father was very proud of this work (as am I), and was an active participant up until his last day.
Safi Alia Shabaik (Egyptian-American, she/her/hers), known by her moniker flashbulbfloozy, is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist working in photography, collage, sculpture, and experimental video. She discovered her visual voice at a young age, setting her on her path to earn a B.A. in Fine Art with honors at UCLA. Under the mentorship of Catherine Opie, she learned the art of large-scale color printing in Opie’s custom-built darkrooms. Upon moving to New York, Safi became fashion stylist, photographic documentarian, personal assistant, travel companion, and confidante to the legendary icon Ms. Grace Jones, in her personal and public lives.
Safi’s photographic work explores identity, persona, transformation, daily life, and the humanity of all people. Her subject matter spans the self, family, street life, fringe culture, and counterculture – people who push their bodies to extremes and challenge societal norms.
Safi exhibits her work nationally and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Black + White Photography, Lenscratch, Alta Journal, Catalyst: Interviews, The Advocate, Parkinson’s Life, CameraCraft, Artillery Magazine, Edge of Humanity, Upworthy.com, and in Grace Jones’ book: I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. She has been featured on The Candid Frame (episode 465), and her work has earned her recognition in PhotoLucida's Critical Mass Top 50. In collaboration with the Parkinson’s Foundation, Safi is the proud recipient of a Visual Arts grant from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) to exhibit Personality Crash nationally. She is the first (ever) recipient of the Las Fotos Project Foto Award for Self-Expression, presented by the Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles. Safi is a founding member of the Los Angeles Street Collective. By invitation, she has presented her work at Open Show, Alta Asks Live, and at several high schools and colleges in the greater Los Angeles area. A lover of the human form, the artist is also an award-winning mortician.