Elsa there
were seven of us and two cameras. Debbie Dorsey, Carol Potoff
and Libby Levenson were the three stars. Bob Burns, Debbie's husband
and a film maker, shot video. He worked with Terry Rockefeller who did
sound. I shot with the Polaroid 20 x 24. Debra Ciolfi, Debbie's
longtime friend, was an extra pair of hands. None of us knew what was
going to happen. We were all here because Debbie, a film maker and
film editor I'd met when I'd pho- tographed her a few years ago, had
called me out of the blue. She said she had been diagnosed with breast
cancer, was going through radiation, and wanted to do something to
take her mind off what she was going through. She won- dered if I had
any ideas. It didn't take long to come up with a plan. I would take
some portraits of Debbie and Bob Burns would film the session. Debbie
said she had two friends she had made while figuring out the chemo
world, Libby Levinson and Carol Potoff, who also would be up for the
portrait-making. Libby is an administrator at a computer publishing
com- pany and Carol is an artist and high school art teacher. We
picked a shoot date, March 12, 1998, when I would meet Libby and Carol
for the first time. I knew I wanted hope in the pictures. I didn't
want shame and I didn't want fear. I wanted fun. I wanted daring. Not
just daring the cancer but daring the camera to work. No break-
downs. I had done portraits of people who knew they were dying,
portraits of people who hoped they weren't dying. Four portraits of
young mothers with breast cancer and their families. Friends with
aids. They were all with me during the No Hair Day shoot. The first
thing we did on the day of the shoot was order pizza and soda from Il
Panino down the street and look at the props I'd asked the women to
bring. Debbie, Carol and Libby had brought hospital night- gowns,
chemo vials, food coloring, books about breast cancer, glamorous
dresses, baseball caps, turbans galore, wigs. And we talked and
talked. I hadn't seen Debbie and Bob Burns in seven years. They had
been given a wedding present of a portrait by me from friends and had
finally used it when their son Bobby was eighteen months. Now they
also have a little girl, Georgia. Libby had come with her patient id
number, cardboard and a color marker. She had the sense that the
pictures probably had to be depressing, and wanted to hold her id
number across her chest, like a person in prison. She wanted to wear
an ugly, shapeless nightgown. But I didn't want to make a portrait in
which she looked ugly or angry or down. So I began by taking a
portrait of where we were: eating pizza. One image led to
another. Because I work with the Polaroid 20 x 24 camera we could see
the photo 70 seconds after I clicked the shut- ter. There it was in
all its clarity and color and dramatic size: 23 x 36 inches. We got
more and more excited. The little miracles thrilled us; the camera
worked; no one blinked, I didn't forget to pull down the negative.
Absolutely nothing went wrong. Libby, who'd had a complete
mastectomy, Carol, who'd had a partial mastectomy and reconstruction,
and Debbie, who'd had a lumpectomy, became increasingly frank and
daring in front of the camera. Bob Burns and Terry Rockefeller were
documenting our every word and every move, adding to our
energy. Occasionally, they would ask us questions on camera. As I
pinned up each sequential picture on my studio board so that we could
examine it, we came up with the next pose simultaneously. We were all
on the same wave.
Bob Burns Debbie
losing her hair was so very traumatic. I can't tell you how many times
we were lying in bed talking about how difficult it was for her to
lose her hair and to be bald. Being bald makes it impossible for you
to ignore that you have cancer. You can't put it aside. You can't
pretend that you don't. You just do. Seeing Debbie---in those
photographs and especially where she's holding up the wig and smiling
at the same time with such a great laugh---was great. It was hard for
me to hold the camera still. Debbie kept talking about wanting to
make a tv show, a tv show about having cancer. And I kept putting it
off, not wanting to do it, not being that interested in it. But when
she actually called Elsa and made this thing happen, then I said,
Jeez, something special could happen there. Let's just go and shoot
it. We didn't even really know we were going to do it till the day of
the shoot, you know, the kids weren't sick so they were going to go to
school, and I didn't have another job that day, I had nothing else I
had to do. And all the equipment was working. So, yeah, let's do it.
Frankly, I did it partially as a way of helping myself deal with it.
Debbie deals with things by talking about them again and again and
again and again. I'm a guy. I talk about things once or twice, and
then, you know, I'm done. Making a project out of it, making a film is
a way, in one sense, of dealing with it. Debbie's brush with death
focused me on the notion of death, too. But it's something as a
society we deal with badly, and we need to do better. We need to take
that and make death present every day, because it really is always
there, and it doesn't have to be such a thing to be scared of. If you
know that it's there every day. . . . The light could fall down on me,
and I'd be dead. That's not likely, but it's there. And if I know that
the light can fall down on me and I would be dead, then I can say,
just say what I'm feeling and not worry about it, because it might be
the last thing I ever say.
