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About the PhotographerDebora Hunter is a Dallas-based photographer who taught photography and art for 40 years at Southern Methodist University. She received an M.F.A. in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design. |
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1980. © Debora Hunter
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There is always a backstory, actually more than one. When a viewer encounters a photograph, especially if it contains very descriptive narrative content, they generally accept what is given as a truthful record. They trust that the factual information is what the photograph is about. But strong photographs offer more, conjuring nuanced readings and richer interpretations. Particulars are transcended as universal truths are explored.
I feel that most clearly when I reflect upon my 1980 series, ‘Waiting: Photographs of the Terminally Ill.’ One backstory: as a university photography instructor, I was contacted by a social agency that was starting up a home hospice program. Working on a limited budget, they asked me if I could recommend a student to work for free photographing the services the agency provided. They wanted to educate the public about the then novel idea that the dying could remain at home rather than be hospitalized. The photographs would show visiting nurses, aids and social workers performing tasks such as taking blood pressure and administering medicine to patients in their home environment. The agency required that the subjects sign legal releases granting permission for the photographs to be used for educational and artistic purposes. Another backstory: my own estranged father had died alone, alcoholic and cancer filled in a hospital room two years earlier. I had recently moved, also alone, to a city that I found foreign and unwelcoming. Pondering questions of isolation and loss I read books about death and dying, most notably Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’. Prepared as I was, I seized the opportunity offered by the agency and volunteered to work with the dying myself. |
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1980. © Debora Hunter
From the start I made two kinds of photographs during each visit. The first, using a handheld 35 mm. camera, I candidly recorded the interaction between the skilled and loving caregiver and the infirm patient. The second group I made for myself, using a medium format camera that I had purchased with the inheritance I received from my father.
In these more formal portraits of the individual alone, we worked together, in silence. I moved nothing in the room and required no effort on the part of my subject. I carefully positioned my tripod to create a composition of lights and darks that described the head, the body and telling details within the patient’s world, a single room. Close-up facial studies of the bed-bound revealed a range of emotions from pain and resignation to acceptance. Wider framing allowed the inspection of common items taking on new meaning: an open Bible, unusable exercise equipment, a televised Game of Fortune, a cluttered bedside nightstand, a cinderblock wall. When I made these portraits I did not consider the ethics of representing the other, a topic that would later enter the public discourse in photographic theory. I carried my own grief and did not feel like an outsider in those bedrooms. It is true that I represented these people as they appeared before me, but it is also true that that my connection with them was informed by my own biography. |
1980. © Debora Hunter
1980. © Debora Hunter
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