Exploring Intimacy in Collaborative Photographic Narratives of Breast Cancer

Agnese Sile

doi:10.3390/h9010027

Abstract

A life-limiting illness brings about heightened awareness of mortality and reshapes close relationships. Couples must often negotiate and adjust their actions to sustain intimate bonds. Through analysis of two projects—Dorothea Lynch’s and Eugene Richards’s collaborative project Exploding into Life (1986) that documents Lynch’s experience living with breast cancer through photographs and text, and Angelo Merendino’s e-book The Battle we Didn’t Choose—My Wife’s Fight with Breast Cancer (2013), I explore how couples make sense of and communicate illness experience. Exploding into Life and Merendino’s project are not only explorations of Lynch’s and Jennifer’s experiences living with breast cancer; the works also question what it means to be seen through the eyes of the other. The projects share similar experiences; however, they are situated in two different historical moments. Taking Arthur Kleinman’s argument of illness experience as social and political as a starting point, I question the limits of experience and examine how the photographs and the accompanying text articulate and mediate private expressions of illness, and what motivates the participants of the photographic act to make their experiences public. The study is informed by Arthur W. Frank’s dialogical narrative analysis and some of the writings by Thomas G. Couser, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault.

Highlights

Illness is commonly defined as a lived experience of physical and mental disease—“a patient’s interpretation of his or her disease, the feelings that accompany it, the life events it turns into” (Mol2002, p. 9).1 illness is not experienced in isolation
Through two case studies—Dorothea Lynch and the American social documentary photographer and her long-term partner Eugene Richards’ collaborative project Exploding into Life (1986), and Angelo Merendino’s e-book The Battle we Didn’t Choose—My Wife’s Fight with Breast Cancer (Merendino 2013a)—my aim is to explore how couples make sense of and communicate illness, how photographs and text allow them to sustain intimacy, and what motivates the participants in the photographic act to make their experiences public
The textual entries, and the photographs that are placed between them, are not dated, which creates a sense of uncertainty; the event is situated within a specific timeframe that is punctuated by temporal markers like “tomorrow”, “afternoon”, “tonight” and “six o’clock in the morning”, we are forced to search for connections

Summary

Introduction

Illness is commonly defined as a lived experience of physical and mental disease—“a patient’s interpretation of his or her disease, the feelings that accompany it, the life events it turns into” Through two case studies—Dorothea Lynch and the American social documentary photographer and her long-term partner Eugene Richards’ collaborative project Exploding into Life (1986), and Angelo Merendino’s e-book The Battle we Didn’t Choose—My Wife’s Fight with Breast Cancer (Merendino 2013a)—my aim is to explore how couples make sense of and communicate illness, how photographs and text allow them to sustain intimacy, and what motivates the participants in the photographic act to make their experiences public. The projects were both published posthumously; Exploding into Life was published three years after Lynch’s passing, and The Battle we Didn’t Choose two years after Jennifer’s death. Before engaging in detailed analysis of these projects, I will provide a brief overview of breast cancer activism

Breast Cancer Activism

Exploding into Life

The Battle We Didn’t Choose

Courtesy

Conclusions