Sarah ChathamPhotographer
Delta Chi, William Woods University, 2008
Portrait of the Artist as Cancer Survivor
Sarah has no hair in the photos she took of herself three years ago. She is bald, beautiful and fighting for her life. Her self-portraits capture a young woman who has cancer, but who is not defined by it.
Today, Sarah has a halo of hard-won auburn curls that softly frame her face. She dances in the living room to Vivaldi when no one is looking. She is launching her own photography business while working full time as a paralegal. She is healthy and considers every day a gift.
The art of coping
It was spring break, her sophomore year, when Sarah found out why she’d been tired all year. She had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
A battery of tests in the hospital was the last thing she thought she’d do for spring break. Her sorority sisters had planned to spend the week with her, and she called them to cancel. They came anyway, bearing armloads full of magazines and books, and staying all weekend in the hospital with her. And she got cards and e-mails throughout the semester and summer until she returned to school.
“I don’t know what I would have done without them,” she says. “The outpouring of love was very special to me.”
Sarah’s art, as well as her Alpha Chi sisters, helped sustain her through her illness and the endlessly alien, sterile environment of the hospital and doctors’ offices. “I wanted to do something creative to reinterpret what I was going through.” She documented the stages of her cancer with black-and-white photography that is stark, spare, and full of shadows and light.
The photos have helped others dealing with cancer, too. She exhibited them at a cancer center in St. Louis and on the William Woods campus.
“I look at them once in a while,” Sarah says. “I see a hint of fear or a smile behind my eyes that I didn’t know I had then. I see a strength or an emotion, maybe, that I didn’t see before.”
Dancing forward
Now Sarah is doing what she loves, pursuing her passion. She takes photos of people at important times of transition—senior portraits, weddings—and of families both young and old.
“I love being behind the camera. And it is amazing to show pictures to people and hear them say ‘you really captured my son, daughter, family… You really captured their spirit.’”
Sarah’s other art is dance. She’s taken ballet, jazz, tap and belly-dancing lessons, and dreamed of being a ballerina. “I went in another direction, but I really try to be a dancer in the way I act toward others—to speak thoughtfully and deliberately, and to be graceful and powerful.
“It’s important to know the power you have in yourself,” she says. “Be confident and know when to be quiet. Powerful is not necessarily the corporate CEO or the weight-lifter. There is strength in being quiet and introspective, too.” |  |