This visual essay sits alongside the paper Toward a Relational Practice: Photographing Stories of Health for Patient Voice, for a graduate course on Visual Culture (CC8921). It brings together photographs, screenshots, and fragments of correspondence from two Patient Voice stories—Justin's and Andrew and Sarah's—arranged not in strict sequence but as a kind of montage of moments before, during, and after a photography session.
I assembled these materials as a way of thinking through my own practice from the inside. Laid out together, they let me see how the different parts of the work connect: the emails and texts before a session, the negotiation of what photos to choose, the editing, the relationships that sometimes continues beyond publication. All of it gathers around the portraits that eventually appear on the site. This functions as a working archive for the project and a way of tracing, visually, the relational practice the paper tries to articulate.
Andrew & Sarah
I was in Victoria when I got the late-night call from my husband Andrew. ‘Are you sitting down?’ he asked. He’d been having back pain since a baseball injury four months before, and now a CT scan had shown a crushed vertebra. And also a tumour on his spine. I FaceTimed him from my boarding gate as they rolled him in for an emergency surgery he might not survive. I cried the whole flight home. The next time we spoke to the doctors, it came with the word 'cancer'. And it was accompanied by words like ‘rare,’ ‘aggressive,’ and ‘stage 4.’
Justin
I’m going to say right up front, getting diagnosed with HIV is scary as hell. I panicked. And it doesn’t help that there’s so much misinformation. Like, when I first got diagnosed seven years ago, I was terrified to go on meds. Basically everything I knew about HIV meds dated back to the ’80s and ’90s, and I’d heard so many side effect horror stories. But, as terrifying and difficult as living with HIV might be in the beginning, it gets easier. You get into the swing of things, you educate yourself, and soon you realize it’s not as scary as people think. The meds are so much more advanced now, and they’re still advancing. I take one pill a day, I think of it like a vitamin, and that’s it. That one pill is enough to make my viral load undetectable and therefore untransmittable. It would be very easy to live a normal and healthy life, if only we could do something about the stigma.