Exploring Intimacy in Collaborative Photographic Narratives of Breast Cancer

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.