One in twenty Australians will be touched by MS, either a family member, a colleague or a friend living with the disease. Despite the large number, MS is often invisible to everyone except the person living with disease, it strikes without warning and leaves no trace.

We teamed up with Grey Melbourne And Infinity Squared to help raise awareness of MS and these symptoms.

 

The Seeing MS campaign helps explain visually what it is like to live day-to-day with MS. As soon as we heard the idea we were hooked. Visual language is something we live and breathe. It is our job to help convey a message and a story in an image. Usually this involves creating a perfect or hyper-real view of the world. In this case however we are producing something raw and real, and by doing so giving a view into a world affected by the disease , one that is usually very difficult to describe.

 

The campaign saw photographers Sara Orme, Jamie MacFadyen, Andreas Smetana, Matt Hoyle, Toby Burrows, Nicholas Walton-Healey, Juliet Taylor, Garth Oriander and Louis Petruccelli each partner with a person living with MS to create a visual interpretation of their symptoms. We retouched some of these images and as such helped the nine people tell their story of what it is like to live with MS.

 

We were then asked to translate these into photographic filters that meaningfully represent each of these symptoms. This was the biggest challenge, crafting filters that are symptomatic but that can be applied to any image to create something visually arresting, all the while avoiding the archetypal. These filters are available via the free Seeing MS app which has so far been downloaded more than 10,000 times and images uploaded from over 70 countries.

The best of these images were exhibited to coincide with World MS Day, while all of the pictures taken by the public and the powerful documentary are on the website at www.seeingms.com.au

The free exhibition ran from May 28 to June 6 at SunStudios, Alexandria NSW.