Where Does Cancer Live Now

This gallery is a photographic representation of six ethnographic encounters from a 2018 study of people living with Stage-IV lung cancer. Our photographs capture their lives beyond the hectic whirl of machines, medications, and medical workers, instead bringing radically ordinary expressions of agency into focus. For our subjects, the paradoxical condition of living with a terminal disease prompts a deep and ongoing reflection on the routines of everyday life. These become symbols of loss and reclamation of agency: while ruptures in routines can reveal the limitations imposed by cancer treatment, for others daily activities come to signify cancer kept in check. These photographs and narratives bear witness to those meaningful mundanities by depicting artifacts of past lives and evidence of new normals. Our aim is to show the role that rich, sensorial photography can play in presenting visual evidence for what matters most to the patient throughout treatment.Our photographs also demonstrate the limits imposed on photography by GDPr-regulated healthcare projects, where we must endeavor to capture the lives of people without showing their faces. We found that the very regulatory constraints that threatened to dehumanize our subjects also allowed us to bring their lives into fuller context. Instead of abandoning photography, we depicted the objects, relationships, and places that were most significant to those we met with. These totemic depictions illustrated their relationship with cancer, as well as their shifting evaluations concerning quality of life throughout their cancer journey

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Context (archaeology · Narrative · Photography · Political science · Representation (politics · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Witness · Empathy and Medical Education · History · Law · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Psychology