WHAT INSPIRED tHE sHE INSIDE…

I have dealt with cancer all my adult life: diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma in 1980, and three breast cancers 1999-2013, I live with many late effects including cardiac and pulmonary damage. But mine is not just a cancer story - it was the effects of my ex-husband’s mental health that ultimately did the greatest emotional damage, and my self-portraiture, based on my writing, explores themes of loss, grief, anger, isolation, and vulnerability.

It was 2011 – I call it The Year of Little Deaths

I broke my arm, my boss broke my job, dad died suddenly of pneumonia, mum died five weeks later of lung cancer. My husband punched and kicked me. My cat died. That was the first five months; by the end of the year breast cancer number two arrived, and so my breasts died too.

I ended my marriage the following year, and faced yet another cancer recurrence alone. I started the kind of aggressive chemotherapy that turns your mind and body into a slug, and by the end, the accumulated side effects of thirty-odd years of cancer treatments left me a shadow of the she I had been. During it all I also fought for my husband’s safety as we navigated his battle with alcohol, suicidal clinical depression, and hospitalisation for the next two years, and to support his recovery despite a difficult divorce.

In the pain of those years I used short form writing as a way of coping with the constant fear, anger, and grief I lived with, and wrote some of the poetry that truly birthed SHE. I also came across Barbie Ritzco, who was photographed for the SCAR PROJECT by the extraordinary David Jay. Her image touched my soul. And yet, much as I truly loved David’s beautiful portraits, most of them didn’t reflect the me I saw in the mirror every day.

I had started photographing myself after the bilateral mastectomy- simply recording physical changes - but as time went on, I realised I was after something much deeper, more visceral. The thing was, people didn’t seem to see me the way I saw myself, the way I felt. So I started looking at how I could show, not physical scars, but the pain of grief, loss, change, the angry and lonesome place of emotional trauma, the vulnerable moments when you feel utterly lost. The stillness of healing.

I moved to Wiltshire in November 2014 and started to rebuild my life. By the time I was studying photography at college in Salisbury less than two years later, I had written the poem ‘The She Inside’ which became the foundation of my photographic project. I had something I needed to say. Yes I am flat, and I’ll happily talk about that, but what this project tries to show you is what it is like to be me. Not the me you see or you think I am, but the one I see every day. From the inside. Healing emotionally is not a continuum, it takes, time, work and sometimes it goes backwards.

In 2017 I submitted a panel of images based on THE SHE INSIDE for my Royal Photographic Society Associateship.

Read more of the short form writing here.

Watch the talk I did with Peter Hayes FRPS in June 2020, as part of the incredibly successful DISTINCTIONS TALK LIVE series the RPS Distinctions team launched during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The impact becoming a professional photographer has had on my life

I’m a visual storyteller, and I believe the most powerful stories we can truthfully tell come from our own. When we find the courage to tell them, even if only to ourselves, they can be life changing.

Photography has played a pivotal role in my storytelling: it is my camera and what I learned to create with it that has given voice to my words in a way I could not possibly have foreseen. It has brought me personal and professional achievement, yes, but more than that, it has brought me to a place of peace in my life.

Dark and difficult times are never easy places to revisit for any of us – our minds have a natural tendency to move away from them as time passes because it’s healthy to do so, and life genuinely does go on. But The She Inside project is my talisman, reminding me how far I’ve come, and how much life is to be loved, no matter what, every single day.

Statement of Intent

THE SHE INSIDE: Portraits of My Self

Survivors – of disease, war, abuse, loss - are often portrayed as proud scarred warriors. And we are, but this is not the everyday reality of our lives, nor does it reflect the emotional traumas we confront long after our bodies have healed.

As a survivor of four cancers (and heart failure) I am no stranger to corporeal destruction, so my decision to reject reconstruction and stay flat after my bilateral mastectomy was, perhaps, natural.

It was other life-changing, parallel events, including the breakdown of my marriage and the death of my parents, that did more visceral damage and, as I recovered, I questioned what it means to survive when everything you once were has gone.

Survival is not something you ‘get through’, it is simply what you are until you are not. I am changed, and must come to terms with what’s left - even if I sometimes feel like a living ghost, and often wonder that others can see me at all.

As a portrait photographer, I wanted to challenge how I see myself in contrast to how others perceive me, or the self I present to them; to explore identity and change, and to consider why I can make an image of myself that I recognise, yet others cannot.

Using self-portraiture was hugely challenging but it was the only truly authentic way to do this.

So here is a visual story of a She that is mine. I know intimately both her sadness and her resilience. Perhaps the true self is a fleeting ephemeral thing: perhaps there is no single self, only moments of now when we are the sum of the moments that went before.

All photographs are taken by me, alone.