Photobook Review with the Author, Jeremy Stigter
EVENT: 2/16 SAT – Next in our series, “Photobook Review with the Author”, we are happy to have Dutch Photographer, Jeremy Stigter with us to talk about his new book, “Vivre”, a book on the experience of living with cancer.
Vivre was published last year by Le Seuil. The book was a collaboration between myself and the head of the oncology unit at hôpital Cochin, professor François Goldwasser.
Each portrait is accompanied by a text in which the person in the photograph gives an account of their experience of life with cancer. These texts are profoundly moving and life affirming. Some are, at times, even quite funny. Unfortunately, they have as yet to be translated into any either English or Japanese (though an attempt will be made to do so come the 16th).
Our point of departure was our need to explain the day-to-day reality of life with cancer, not only for those that are ill, but also for their family and friends, and for the medical staff too. The series of portraits represents then a mix of these 3 groups. Another important concern was to provide a vehicle by which to demystify cancer, to show that being ill with cancer did not make one ‘untouchable’.
Cancer is often talked about either as a horrible terminal illness, or in terms of some sensational discovery ‘in the fight against cancer’. The reality of medical advance in this field is, in fact, quite different: it is not the increase of the number that are cured of cancer but rather the increase in the number of those that get to live ever longer, more or less normally, with some kind of cancer, even cancers that have reached an advanced stage. The real consequences of advances in medicine result then in a growing number of incurable patients who have to learn to live with their particular form of illness. This is is the subject tackled in the book.
TIME: 2013/2/16(SAT) 16:00
Place: Reminders Photography Stronghold
Fee: 1,000円
Host: Curator Yumi Goto
Guest: Jeremy Stigter
http://www.jeremystigter.com/
Biography:
Jeremy Stigter was born in Holland in 1958. He went to university in London where he studied history, then to Bruges and Paris where he studied political science. He took to photography in Tokyo where he lived for close to a year in 1986. He published his first work in Switch Magazine (“Tango”, 1988). Over the years he has worked for numerous magazines and newspapers such as Taxi Magazine, The New York Times (New York), Libération, Vogue, Figaro Madame (Paris), The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times (London), and De Volkskrant (Amsterdam). He has had exhibitions in Paris, Amsterdam, Rome and Tokyo (Zeit Foto Salon 1993, The Deep 1996). He published The Jewish Bride with Nazraeli Press in 2008, and Vivre with Le Seuil in 2012. He is now preparing a book on Japan with La Martiniere (Paris).
Photobook Review with the Author Archive:
German Photographer, Wolfgang Bellwinkel
Azerbaijani photographer, Rena Effendi