The Arts have a special arrow straight to our emotions. After all, we are visual before we are verbal so it makes a lot of sense when we say a photograph can transcend a thousand words. This means that we can connect and communicate with ourselves and with others emotionally through visual imagery – a photograph.

What we choose to photograph, what we see in a photograph, how we understand others through a photograph, all this can be used to see differently and show that we are not bound to see the same behavioral old patterns, believe the same old beliefs, react with the same old emotions, but we can choose to change our view and make it happier at the same time while making ourselves more resilient.

The basic premise from the field of Positive Psychology is that happy people live better lives and are more resilient when bad things happen. In the thirty years since its conception positive psychology has created the tools to measure happiness and has shown that it is teachable – there are now many well validated interventions to increase happiness.

As a positive psychologist, Mandy Seligman is well-versed in the science and the interventions. Photography, in her view, ticks all the boxes in the theory of well-being. Photography has the ability to make us happy and more able to deal with the stress of daily life. So when the pandemic hit, she used her camera more and more to boost her own well-being. She noticed many other people were doing the same, so very quickly the idea arose to create a community of people sharing their search for joy and happiness through their everyday photographs.

SeeingHappy was born as a community-based platform driven towards sharing how Photography and the Arts can build well-being and resilience.