POP: You’ve taken dozens of images of breast cancer survivors, of all these images, which has impacted you the most and why?
Perhaps the picture of Sara, the redheaded girl with tears running down her face. The shoot was going well, smoothly. Laughter. The pictures looked honest, good. I was pleased with the images we had captured. I loaded the pictures into the computer and called Sara over to look. She came and stood behind me in silence. Then tears. Mine too. I grabbed the camera again, “Now, we take pictures.”
There’s something about photography that’s very real. We’re so accustomed to seeing ourselves in a mirror but that reflection is actually reversed. A photograph isn’t. That’s why it’s often shocking to see yourself in a photograph—it’s not what you see in the mirror every day. It’s what everyone else sees. In that moment, Sara came face to face with herself. She’d had a double mastectomy in her mid-20s. It was shocking.