PHOTO: When Nampa Fire Capt. Frank Beauvais reached out to a photographer friend in February, he wasn’t looking for photos that he could hang on his mantelpiece. He just wanted to better understand his experience with post-traumatic stress.
For several months, Beauvais had been working with a counselor to try to understand and heal from PTSI, or post-traumatic stress injury, that had left him struggling and feeling disconnected from his wife and two children. In the counseling sessions, Beauvais had found he lacked the words to express what he was feeling. In an effort to try to communicate how he felt, he set up a private photography session with his friend Macey Snelson, “where he could use art to express what he was experiencing inside,” Snelson. During the session, the two friends just talked about how Beauvais was feeling, sussing out graphic scenes he’d been exposed to as a firefighter. The post-traumatic stress was “an aggregate of things,” Beauvais said, “specifically children that passed away,” that continued to weigh on him.