Here's the full collaboration with fellow photographer, Abbey Turner. She is currently fighting Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and this photo series was an attempt to visualize some of the realities of life for her through this time. Abbey was kind enough to write a bit to describe some of her thought process that the photos represent.
On a personal level, being trusted to tell stories that are important is really a lot of what photography is about for me. The storytelling aspect is one that I know I can grow a lot in, but I hope to keep getting those opportunities. There's the old trope about a camera being able to steal your soul, but I think the chances are overstated. Making a photo with soul is one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do.
1/4 “The first thing they did when I went in for chemo was weigh me to dose the exact amount of chemo drugs needed to kill all the new cells in my body without stopping my heart. For me it’s about loss of identity and the body, and about the dance I feel like I’m doing crossing over between life and death. Since my chemo was every two weeks, I would have one week barely able to see or move, and one week trying to be normal and deal with mundanity of catching up to life. With the brain fog and memory loss I experienced under chemo, I often felt like just a body being experimented on with needles and drugs. It felt like a lot of time my brain was missing or my cognitive function and mental health was a slave to what my body had to go through.”
2/4 “There is a progression of cancer taking over your life. It’s all-consuming in the same way that it physically is, starting with just a mutated cell and eventually taking over every organ and killing your body if allowed to run its course. One little seed of doubt or negative experience can feel massive and completely disruptive when you’re trying so hard just to make it through the day.”
3/4 “There is a light I’m trying to not only see but create where everything feels overwhelmingly dark. For me this journey has been lonely and I have felt often that if I didn’t create or work towards creating my own light, laughter, happiness, etc it was easy to succumb to the darkness.”
4/4 “Maybe our lives weren’t meant to become monuments. Maybe we are here only to make this experience slightly better for those around us. Maybe we are here to understand pure suffering and pure joy, and to find peace in just that. Pain will always endure. But so will laughter. So will the spark of human touch, and the cycle of nature. If I am just passing through, I will find the most beautiful ugly way to do so.”
