I am greatly honored and humble by a recent article written by the talented writer Rob Wilson for Frames Magazine Digital Companion. It’s about Jody’s Cancer Story. It’s a story I shot ten years ago but has regain light with recent interests. Frames Magazine champions excellence in photography in all forms. They felt compelled to help share her story with my photographs to its members. I highly recommend you read this if you want to get a good sense as to who we are as artists, patients, friends, survivors, human beings. This is the most eloquent explanation as to which I do and what I love to do.

Please check out Frames Magazine online for some wonderful photography and words about it.

TELLING JODY’S STORY

Rob Wilson

In the columns that I write for FRAMES, I sometimes have the honor of bringing you images and stories that I think are very special indeed. For this month’s column, I delighted to bring you a photo essay that left me near speechless when I first saw it. It is a narrative that is so universal and so relevant to each and every one of us that it instantly compelled me to make it the focus of this article. Now you might think that I am indulging in a bit of hyperbole here. I am happy to admit that my prose may turn a little on the purple side when I get a bit too excited about some of the photographs that I write about, but that is not the case here. This is a work that contains the two elements I most often mention when I talk about images of people that move me; it is both humane and humanistic, but it is also so much more than that. This exceptional essay is by Christian Peacock and is called Jody’s Cancer Journey.

Peacock is a California-based documentary photographer. He began his career in New York before returning to his home city of San Francisco where he is now based. He has worked with an impressive range of clients. These include Barclays Bank, Benziger Wine, Blue Cross, and Business Week, and that is only a few of the ‘B’s. In addition to the commercial work, he has also published a successful series of fine art posters. His website contains the by-line “Capturing the human spirit” and this encapsulates the focus of his work perfectly. The images and projects that he creates are all about people. Whether his work features the Lakota people of South Dakota, with whom he worked on a project called Reclaiming Futures that attempts to help young people caught in a spiral of drugs and crime, or celebrities like the legendary Willie Nelson, it is always our shared humanity that it is central to his photography.

However, this story does not only belong to Peacock. It also belongs to Jody, but it is through Peacock’s visual prose that her story is brought to extraordinary life. She had survived a previous battle with cancer for over ten years earlier, but this time, when the disease returned in another form, Peacock was there to record and share her journey. The essay as a whole captures the ups, the downs, the times of pain, and the moments of joy.

The complete essay contains multiple images that carry substantial power, and all of those we feature here are strong, but I want to focus particularly on two of the pictures. The first is one of the most powerful images that I have had the honour of featuring in this column. It is simply entitled Winter. Jody had been placed in isolation due to a dramatic fall in her white blood count. Throughout her treatment, she was supported by the love and kindness of her friends, family, and medical team, but here she is utterly alone. Peacock had been documenting his friend’s entire story from diagnosis onwards, but it was here that she reached her nadir. Besides its obvious power and pathos, the photograph demonstrates that great photographs are made by great photographers and not by cameras. On this particular day, Peacock was not carrying his camera equipment and shot this on an iPhone. The tool used here matters not. This intimate image carries a universality that I suspect every single one of us can understand. By the time we have reached even a moderate age, we will have all either endured or watched any number of friends, family, and loved ones suffer with illness that we are powerless to do anything about.

The other image that I particularly wish to focus on is the final photograph, Transformation, which shows an imaginary world where Jody is releasing a bird and

has a cloth streaming out behind her. This tells a very different story to rest of the essay. Throughout the rest of the essay cancer looms large, its inescapable presence pervades every one of the photographs. Yet, this is a light and rather joyful image with its significance only revealed by its presence in the series. This is Jody facing a hopeful future. The black bird being released perhaps signifies a potential end to the extraordinarily challenging process that she has been through. The sunlit hills in the distance hint at a brighter and cancer-free world.

The rest of the images give us a fascinating and moving insight into Jody’s story. We feel her emotional turbulence, fear, and exhaustion that she endured through the course of her treatment, but we also see the support of others. In the first of the images entitled Chemo Round Two, she lays her head onto her husband’s face. This is a truly human experience.

Chemo Round two. Waiting with her husband. 2012

I asked Jody how she felt through the whole experience. I was going to use her words as a reference for this article, but instead I would like to share them with you. Her moving prose encapsulate the whole experience far more effectively than what I could write.

“It was the hell realms- literally, trial by fire with radiation treatment. I discovered a level of strength in my vulnerability - I experienced the profound sense of the fragility of life and the incredible resilience of my body to repair itself and heal. I had the opportunity to address vanity - one that’s been a lifelong issue and one that still gives me trouble. I discovered that I was truly loved and supported by family and friends. I experienced deep gratitude for the power of a kind word or a gentle touch by a caregiver or loved one that could soothe and comfort. But in the end, cancer treatment is truly a very lonely journey, a walk no one can do for you. I said the 23rd Psalm a lot during those months. “Yae though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil...”. And, I am not a religious person, but it helped me to stay strong, stay the course, muscle through each day one day at a time, sometimes one moment at a time, hopefully with some level of grace and dignity. I will be forever grateful to Christian and my husband for the unflagging love and care. Because I know for caregivers it may be even harder because they to feel so helpless in the face of such a difficult journey.”

Just diagnosed and facing her future at SFMOMA. 2011

Peacock often heard people comment that Jody was “too beautiful to get cancer”. Of course, how we look has nothing to do with our vulnerability to what Siddhartha Mukherjee named “The Emperor of All Maladies”, but it did lead Jody and Peacock to question whether the response to the photographs would have been different if they had featured him, a middle-aged man. This is certainly an interesting point, but the photographs are so expertly crafted, so moving, so personal, and so humane that I think Peacock could have woven an impressive story about any subject. However, the fact that his subject, Jody, is an instantly engaging figure adds an impressive and meaningful icing to this exceptional photographic cake.

Reflecting on this article, I do not think that I could truly do it justice even with thousands of words more. I can only remember one previous essay about illness captivating me in a similar way; that was an essay by Ed Kashi that documented the final years of his father-in-law’s life as he struggled with dementia. Sadly, I have not been able to locate Kashi’s essay online to share with you for comparison. However, Jody’s Cancer Journey needs no comparison. It stands alone as outstanding work developed from a collaboration between a photographer at the peak of their powers and a subject, who despite being in unimaginable pain and distress, understood the need for this compelling and universal story to be told. Jody’s may be a painful story, but it is a hopeful one as I am happy to report that Jody has now been cancer free for ten years. She and Peacock will soon visit Mexico not to continue the cancer diary, but to make new images and to tell new stories.

Rob Wilson for Frames Magazine https://readframes.com/