When psychiatrist and photographer Barbara Young, M.D., developed bursitis in a hip in 1997, she started to swim for physical therapy. She soon became immersed in the lives of other users of the pool and gym at Baltimore’s League for People With Disabilities, many of them dealing with wide-ranging physical disorders, mental retardation, and/or traumatic brain injuries.

"The healing came not just from the 90-degree water," she said, "but from the warmth of the companionship." With her prospective subjects’ permission, she started toting her camera along with her gym bag. An exhibit of more than 100 of Young’s photos, "Faces of the League: One Woman’s Perspective," was on display at the league last November.

"I wanted to show the extraordinary spirit of the place," Young said. "People are people first, and disabled, second. There is nothing like watching a child crippled with cerebral palsy swimming confidently across the pool, or highly motivated adults, such as a police officer blinded by a gunshot wound or a woman impaired by a stroke, persevere day after day in the forest of machines at the fitness center."

Young documented these events, along with social life on the league’s garden patio, an important aspect, she said, of the league’s supportive environment. The photos are to become part of a permanent collection, with a rotating selection on display in the league’s main hallway.

"Painting with a camera has been an ideal complement to my sedentary life as a psychiatrist," Young wrote in an essay, "In the Mind’s Eye," appearing in Doctors Afield, a new book that examines the lives of 27 physicians who combined their medical careers with art, music, literature, politics, wine making, and other pursuits (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000).

Young came to Baltimore in 1942 to attend the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and stayed on. Trained as a psychoanalyst, she has been in private practice for more than 50 years. She started taking photos in midlife on a vacation trip to the Bahamas that led eventually to a book, The Plop-a-Lop Tree, documenting life in a small island community. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was featured in a show at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1996. A résumé of her photography publications, exhibitions, and awards runs to four single-spaced pages.

Young often gives talks on the creative way of life, encouraging residents and members of other audiences to take time to get to know themselves. "If they can tolerate the possible anxiety and ‘down’ feeling elicited by looking inside the self," she maintained, "a resurgence of well-being, rejuvenation, and even inspiration will follow and perhaps set the hand to moving."

Her photography, she said, has been a source of healing at times of crisis in her own life. "It is the core of my existence," she said. "It is where my soul resides."