at our event tomorrow evening (sometime between 6 and 6:30) there will be a live performance of a song that diedrich weiss wrote when he was volunteering in the cancer unit & inpatient mental health unit. he has kindly offered to come perform his song Wounds to Scars, which you can listen to in the sidebar. look to your right.
and here is a sneak peek of us hanging the show. we are doing math!
if you have followed our project at all, you may recognize our dear Colleen. the first time we met her, we went up to her opera house in staples, mn and spent 15 life-changing hours with her. we learned about 975,000 things that day, but one of those things is that Colleen makes boxes.
she makes boxes for her son. there is one for him to open on his wedding day. graduation. the birth of his baby. the boxes contain all the things she wants to share with him on those milestones in his life. you know, in case she isn’t there to tell him herself.
this year we asked Colleen to do a presentation about legacy, and share her thoughts about these boxes that she makes. if you would like to take part in this discussion, please join us by 7 pm on saturday when she will get started. 
These are the kind of incredible women you’ll see next Friday at our opening exhibition.
Why Lori Shares her Scars from Kate Kunkel on Vimeo.
our intention with this project was, in the very beginning, to take photos of the taking apart and putting back together of women in the various stages of having and surviving breast cancer. while that remains true and is our starting point with the women we work with, we realized we would want to present the images as more than just photos. there are things we want to do with the photos in the editing process, and we have lots of ideas about that. there are also other mediums we’d like to work in – like video and audio.
as we went into our shoot with ann (see also the previous post about ann and frida the wig) we were reading through the notes in her file. we send each of the models some questions to help us understand how she feels about herself, her surgery, her process, her body. her image. one of the things we ask is for them to circle words from a list of adjectives that help describe the way they feel about themselves. we read ann’s list and were just beside ourselves when we found that she had done the exercise but then went one step further by writing in her own list of words. we were reading the list in the car on the way to the shoot and as we began taking pictures, her words were echoing and inspiring us. we have a lot of pictures from that day that we want to use, but one in particular grabbed my attention – even though i almost passed it over when pulling out the main images i wanted to work with for the shoot. i set it aside for a few days and wondered what to do with it, until it occurred to me that it needed to be the backdrop for her list. her wonderful, amazing, inspiring list. i love the photo because you can’t tell if she is laughing or screaming – and paired with the list, it could be either. i know what she’s doing because i was there, but i’m not telling.
while we are keeping most of the images from the shoots under wraps to exhibit in a physical space all at once, we do want to share peeks of what we are up to. this is the piece i have been working on for ann’s list. i honestly don’t know if it is finished yet, or how i feel about it – please feel free to comment and let me know what thoughts and emotions it stirs up for you.
