jonah faigel, 1996.
silver gelatin print
20"x24"
from the series: children with cancer
"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, which gives the strength to live and continually try new things." –Vaclav Havel
* * *
I began photographing young people with cancer in 1996. This work is a collaboration with over thirty-five young people and their families from the Boston area. The young people range in age from ten months to twenty-seven years, and they are in treatment for a variety of cancers.
My wish has been to create a body of work that will stand in contrast to much of the photographic record of disease. Instead of concentrating on the doctors, the procedures, and the medical technology that surrounds our contemporary experience of cancer, I want to make images that are about these young people and their uniqueness. The photographs are made with an 8x10 inch view camera, inside homes and at favorite places far from hospitals and oncology clinics. Even though I am always looking for new and less graphic ways to make illness visible, I want my photographs to be more about imagination than they are about disease.
The pictures aren't traditional documents. They're not about "events". They are records only of what I have seen and felt, and in many cases, imagined. From the beginning, I've told myself that I wanted them to be about hope. Not "hope" in the sense of white balloons and sunrises and pretty flowers, but hope in all of its complexity.
Maybe what I'm trying to locate is the thing that so gracefully moves these young people forward, despite information that might otherwise suggest a tragedy.
"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, which gives the strength to live and continually try new things." –Vaclav Havel
* * *
I began photographing young people with cancer in 1996. This work is a collaboration with over thirty-five young people and their families from the Boston area. The young people range in age from ten months to twenty-seven years, and they are in treatment for a variety of cancers.
My wish has been to create a body of work that will stand in contrast to much of the photographic record of disease. Instead of concentrating on the doctors, the procedures, and the medical technology that surrounds our contemporary experience of cancer, I want to make images that are about these young people and their uniqueness. The photographs are made with an 8x10 inch view camera, inside homes and at favorite places far from hospitals and oncology clinics. Even though I am always looking for new and less graphic ways to make illness visible, I want my photographs to be more about imagination than they are about disease.
The pictures aren't traditional documents. They're not about "events". They are records only of what I have seen and felt, and in many cases, imagined. From the beginning, I've told myself that I wanted them to be about hope. Not "hope" in the sense of white balloons and sunrises and pretty flowers, but hope in all of its complexity.
Maybe what I'm trying to locate is the thing that so gracefully moves these young people forward, despite information that might otherwise suggest a tragedy.
