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Still Life: Documenting Cancer Survivorship

August through September, 2007

This national traveling photographic exhibit, conceived and developed by The Creative Center of New York, portrays the personal survivorship experiences of twenty-five individuals with cancer. Funded by a generous grant from the Lance Armstrong Foundation, participants worked with a photographer-in-residence, leading educators and curators from some of NY's major museums to produce portfolios that conveyed their survivorship experience.

The Creative Center is a community of artists, cancer patients and survivors, trustees, donors, and friends who are dedicated to bringing creative arts to people who are living with cancer and to supporting patients and families from hospitals and hospices throughout the New York area.

Exploring both the technical and artistic aspects of documenting one's own life, this artistic "community" met weekly to learn everything they could about the medium. For most participants, taking pictures was what you did at Christmas, birthdays and graduations. The idea of using photography as a way to tell a story was completely new, especially as the "story" was unknown. Through shooting every day, visits to the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art, group meetings with other participant photographers and photographer-in-residence Karen Furth, each person developed a tale of survivorship that is as unique as the human spirit.

Through their work, the photographers have created relationships to the past and the long history of documentary photography, and to the future, as the impact of these photographs will affect fellow survivors, the medical establishment and policymakers for years to come.

The Book

Still Life, published by Umbrage Books, features a selection of photographs and text by Creative Center participants from the Still Life project. Please visit www.thecreativecenter.org for ordering information.

 

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See Also:

• Maps and Directions
• Grief and Loss Program
• Complementary Therapy Program

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