Vera is a photographer who, for thirty years, took portraits of strangers in the front room of a small studio above a bakery. She knew how to light a face. She knew how to wait for the half-second when a person stopped performing and simply was. So when her own diagnosis came, she turned the lens around — not at first, but slowly, over the course of a long, quiet winter.
The first photographs she took, she says, were terrible. Hospital hallways, the back of her own hand, the bowl of cereal on the kitchen table at four in the morning. She didn't know what she was doing. But she kept doing it, the way she had always kept showing up for the work, and after a while the photographs started to belong to her instead of the illness.
Treatment was long and uneven. There were weeks when her energy collapsed, and weeks when she could almost forget. Her partner learned to read the days in her face and to bring her coffee in the right cup. Her grown daughter flew in from Seattle and stayed longer than she'd planned. Vera kept photographing — the first pour of coffee, the light in the hallway, the hands of the nurse who always remembered her name.
The series became a book. Not a big one — a small thing, hand-bound, that she gives away at the cancer center on the days she has a treatment. She says the book is not really about being sick. It is about paying attention. She suspects she would have made it sooner, if she had known how.
