Nature will listen

IN 2013–14, Trevor Parsons suffered his second mental breakdown. It was a combination of work, stress and anxiety, which led to him barely sleeping at night, not eating and splitting up with his then partner. A stint at St Ann’s hospital in Poole, Dorset, followed, but, even after he left, life was hardly back to normal.

‘I was scared to even go outside,’ he tells me. ‘My parents just about convinced me to get in the car and took me to the local doctor. When I was there, she suggested that I set a timer on my phone and head down to the Bournemouth Gardens and take some pictures. When the timer went off, I went home and wrote down how I felt.’ As the days and weeks progressed, Mr Parsons went back to Bournemouth Gardens, with the timer set a little bit longer each day, and could track his progress—‘after two weeks, I made it as far as Bournemouth Beach,’ he says. It was when he was meandering through the town and taking pictures, that he found his most effective form of therapy—Nature.

‘Since 2018, I’ve been telling my story,’ he says. ‘It’s being out in the green spaces, with a camera or without, it doesn’t matter to me. We’re born from Nature, so it makes sense that we are a part),working for Getty and getting images published in . When he’s not taking pictures, he’s telling his story.