Photo-Therapy Day 20019: Mark Wheeler

Mark Wheeler

Principal Registered Art Psychotherapist

Nottingham Mental Health Service NHS Clinic

Mark Wheeler is a Registered Art Psychotherapist & supervisor working in NHS Child & Family Therapy & private practice. Mark is listed on the Department of Health National Clinical Expert Database, selected to provide advice at national level. In clinical work, Mark engages families & individuals in conversations with their images, physical or smart-phone or imagined, to assess &address a variety of difficulties or disorders. Mark teaches, trains & facilitates masterclasses & workshops.

Mark lectures & delivers workshops to Art Psychotherapists, to Clinical Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Psychotherapists, Counselors & Mental Health professionals & to fine art & photography undergraduates &masters students. In 2004 Mark was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. Mark was an invited plenary speaker at the First International PhotoTherapy Symposium, Turku, 2008 & has regularly been presenting & facilitating at international conferences since 1997 ECArTE. Mark’s publications include book chapters & journal articles & he is a peer reviewer. He has been interviewed & quoted in various media. Mark continues to make & exhibit art works including photographs. Mark initially used therapeutic photography with adolescents at a therapeutic community, from 1985. He became the first British photography graduate to undertake postgraduate Art Therapy training. Mark’s qualifying dissertation (1992) was Phototherapy: The Use Of Photographs In Art Therapy, for which he interviewed Judy Weiser and plundered her library.

Mark came to Art Therapy and PhotoTherapy via his practice as a photographer. The unique photographic syntax & the capacity of photographs to short-circuit many of our mental visual filters, culminates in our unique relationships with photographs among all visual images. Mark has been a freelance commercial photographer, a big yellow school bus driver, a writer on music and audio but since age 10 Mark has been obsessed making photographs and with the psychological aesthetics of making and viewing images, especially photographs.