When I first saw these images, they had a deep emotional impact on me. They sparked my curiosity about pain, the body, and how we perceive and cope with death. The patients' eyes stood out—showing sadness but also a strange calmness, as if some had made peace with their fate. There was a quiet beauty in the images, a kind rarely seen or appreciated in people. Most importantly, the photos captured the raw humanity of these patients during their most vulnerable moments.
A black and white portrait of a young woman: her round head is propped up on a pillow. The weary face, which is fully turned toward the camera, speaks of profound demoralization. Her overshadowed, strangely commanding eyes draw in the gaze of the onlooker. A thickly swollen throat, a partially exposed chest, and her face fill three-quarters of the image, diagonally. In the indistinct white background, one discerns the shadow of a window through which daylight enters—light from the outside world which this woman, stricken with Hodgkin’s disease, might never have seen again. Another image shows the emaciated head of a middle-aged, unshaven man resting on a cushion. With the head turned slightly away, his gaze passes the viewer, deeply absorbed in an inauspicious distance, a realm of pain, desperation, or perchance, expectation of things to come. This man with inoperable stomach cancer is bound to die. Nothing in the neutral, slightly blurry backdrop of hospital linens and cubicle curtains claims the viewer’s attention; her scrutiny is directed exclusively toward the subjects’ faces
- Elisa Primavera-Lévy, Spring, 2011
Material: Handmade collage, zBrush 3d scanning