story portraits
A collection of portraits to celebrate life and love, to honor those close to us, and to remember the ones we’ve lost.
Emily A.
“I was 27 when I finally became a mom. It was my lifelong dream. I was 28 when my life got flipped upside down and my sweet one year old was diagnosed with leukemia. It took almost a year to finally diagnose the type of leukemia. It was a rare type that men over 50 get, not one-year-old precious little girls. Our only course of action was a bone marrow transplant.
Alivia went through more in her short life than I can explain. She fought so hard. Holding her in my arms as she left this world profoundly changed y life, my world, everything. I have tried to live a better life, love more, laugh, explore, take risks, because Alivia didn’t get to and I want to make her proud. Being a mother with no one to mother was harder than I can explain. being a mom again now is a dream come true.”
Bryan s.
“I grew up in Baltimore. Divorced parents, and I had a mom who was an O’connor. Very Irish Catholic family. Her name’s Betty but they call her ‘Honey’. I’ll be 57 next month and today I still don’t know the truth. My mother really never knew what the word love. She was born in 1930, dark skin, Irish catholic family. Tough time to be a dark skin child. I have six brothers and sisters, one being a twin, but we all have different fathers. Here I don’t know who my dad is.
God rest his soul, my identical twin brother passed away 24 years ago. And he was a homosexual…and I would never want him to change who he is or his life. Because I learned a lot from that. and I think what I learned most from that is to accept people for who they are. He’s my flesh, ya know. And that’s why I hold tight to my mom, who today would still take her lies to her grave. THat’s the card she was dealt and this is what I was dealt, and my brother, that’s who he is, ya know. And there’s nothing I would change about how I feel about him It’s what I’ve learned, to accept the homosexual community, different colored skins, people’s prerogatives. I’ve learned that from my brother, and it led me to who I am today.”
Nathalie S.
Captured on her 98th birthday.
Soren W.
“At age 12 I was at a camp on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. From that camp we hiked 67.5 miles in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and that took us over the Franconia Ridge. I can’t explain why, but that whole experience and the views just looking over all the mountains stuck with me. I certainly didn’t realize it at the time how much it would become a part of me.
Two years later at age fourteen I said to a friend of mine “Let's hike the Appalachian Trail” meaning the entire trail. Well it didn’t happen. We ended up doing some hikes in the Catskills and that was it. But the thought never left me. I mean it was like a great whale deep in my being, and as I saw 65 coming at me at 2005 I realized that next year I was going to turn 65 and the thought--just like a whale breaching, is the way I would describe it--just rose up inside of me. And just wow, wouldn’t it be neat to celebrate my 65 birthday at the top. And with that the thought of actually doing the Appalachian Trail never left me.
I told my office and my family every year if I can close my office by the end of the year I will start the trail by spring. And I had been saying that for 10 years. Along came 2015 and I referred the last of my cases and I changed my license plate to read “IK9AT16”, which means my dog and I are hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2016. And I would tell people that the fact that I'm gonna do the Appalachian Trail, is not in stone but it is in metal.
Valentines Day 2016 was the last day I shaved. I had Valentines Day with my whole family. That was a Sunday. That Thursday I had a one-way car rental to Georgia. It took my wife about 10 years to get her to come around and accept that I needed to do this. And she was great. She knew she was going to be alone for the better part of a year. A good friend whom I saw half way said “Good luck. I question your judgment. Be safe.” I got that a fair amount. I said to myself if life cannot accommodate an Appalachian Trail, there’s something wrong with life. I had been a lawyer, semi-retired at this point. It took a lot to shut the office down. It took a while.
I asked Soren if he had an “Aha” moment on the trail. He replied “The Appalachian Trail runs through my conscious mind like a river and only those who have done such a hike know how deep and wide it is. We were back at Franconia Ridge. My dog was with me. And the wind was just howling. Clouds were blowing in and blowing out. You could see the distant mountains and sunlight and then you couldn’t see them at all. And I just howled right back at the wind with everything in me.”
I’ve written a thousand pages. I’ll get back out and do some hiking again. Not sure what or if there’s another big adventure. The thing for me about the Appalachian Trail is it wasn’t just a good idea. It was in me. I knew when I took the first step that I would take the last. I didn’t question it for a second. Never. I did wonder a couple of times whether my body was going to let me finish. It’s hard. My feet were bad for about a thousand miles. I had blisters between my toes. I had plantar fasciitis on my heel. It’s an irritation of the tendon, and it’s painful. Basically my feet weren’t gonna heal if i was gonna keep walking, but I wasn’t gonna stop.”
“My story is both a personal one as well as a milestone. On December 14, I was diagnosed with cancer. On January 5, I got my specific cancer diagnosis. The official diagnosis? Stage 4 duodenal adenocarcinoma; small bowel cancer. It’s a rare, aggressive cancer that mostly affects extremely unhealthy men in their 60s. The prognosis was mind numbing. I was told I may be able to get five more years left to live. Remission was not a common thing; only 5% of patients ever made it to that stage of the diagnosis. So, being a 26 year old woman, it was quite a shock.
My whole world was flipped upside down. One minute, I was complaining about normal everyday things; work, lack of money, other stressors that any 26 year old complains about. I took things for granted. I appreciated the people in my life, but I was so proud of my independence that I could rarely gather up the guts to reach out and ask for help. And suddenly, in a little over 24 hours, my independence was shaken. As a self described “social butterfly” there were weeks where I could barely get out of bed. It was honestly the toughest thing I’ve ever had to go through.
In the past year, I’ve gotten through five surgeries including a hysterectomy, a blood infection, 12 doses of chemo, a severe allergic reaction to one of my chemo drugs, and a depression diagnosis (something that’s very common with cancer patients). I’ve spent a collective three weeks in a different hospital over the course of three different visits. But, in the past year, I’ve also developed a better appreciation for the small things around me, both big and small. I was at the point where, if I didn’t reach out for help, I wouldn’t be able to get through it. I hung onto every moment that brought me even the slightest bit of happiness.
I was starting to think about the things I wanted to do in life and I started working on actually doing them. In my head, if I only had five years left to live, I was going to make it so that when I looked back on them, I’d be proud of everything I did. There were days that were so hard, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do it anymore. But, there were days where I had so much fun, and days that I laughed until I cried.
And now, almost a full year later, I’ve reached the point that seemed unreachable; remission. I’ve successfully had four months without having a single chemo infusion and nothing has shown up in any of my scans. All my hard work, all the support of my friends and family, it all paid off in ways I can’t even bring to words. Of course, my fight isn’t over. Actually, I don’t think it will ever be completely over. But I’ve got a game plan that is foolproof. I reach out when I need help. I tell my friends and my family that I love them. I do things that make me happy. I laugh when I’m happy. I cry when I’m sad. I’m stepping out of my comfort zone more and more. I’m working on living a life that I’m proud of. So, no matter the outcome….no matter if I get five years, or ten years, or fifteen, I’ve already won the battle.”
Kelly E. (1992-2021)
John G.
“My passion is in education. My father was a teacher, my mother worked in the school system, my sister is a teacher. I was associate commissioner of the Southeastern conference, which is big time college football. I worked at the NCAA as well. And so with the birth of our first child, I left that to be a stay at home parent. As the kids got older I had this wonderful chance to reinvent myself. So as a lifelong musician, I started doing the research about how school music programs and community music programs are getting cut, and all the research about how effective it is as educational community building tool. And it just didn’t make sense to me. On one hand you cut it, and on the other, the evidence about how valuable it is was rising.
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I got a bunch of buddies together and said let’s do a little fundraiser. We raised about ten thousand bucks, gave out a bunch of instruments, and then it just exploded. We started in 2007 and now we’re closing in on about 2 million dollars invested in school and community music programs. Everything from instruments, to instruction, to instrument repair, to having school programs and summer camps. Music is math, music is reading, music is logic, music is creativity. It’s all of it. It’s a universal language.
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We did this ten years ago. The way it started was I was in london and I just saw a piano on the streets outside of some business, just sitting there. It wasn’t painted or anything and I thought that’s cool maybe we should do that. So I came back to the board and said hey we’re gonna do this. I said we’re gonna put five pianos in the streets. And my board, his name’s Craig Welsh. He said “No no no we’re not gonna do that, we’re gonna do 20 of them, and we’re gonna paint every single one.” So we’re like yeah sure right, but I remember going through the city and telling them what we were gonna do and Rick Gray said “You guys are crazy”, but the next thing he said was “What can we do to help?” And so everybody came to us and said you know those pianos aren’t gonna last a week before they’re vandalized. Our narrative was always that we trust in Lancaster; we think people are good people and they’re gonna take care of them.
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So 20 pianos, 24/7 access for four months solid. And at the end of that, there was only one incident of vandalism. So the narrative became “What a great town, what a great community we’re living in that cares about the arts and takes care of our stuff”. And now people look forward to it every summer.”
faces AGAINST RACISM
In May of 2020, America and the world witnessed the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis MN. Only two months into the Covid-19 pandemic and unsure of what to do, I came up with a simple fundraising idea; donate $100, get a portrait from me, and share it on Instagram to let others know, until I take 100 portraits and we raise $10k.
Over the course of the next few months, and in a time of great financial uncertainty for many, the good folks of Lancaster came together and exceeded our goal, raising over $11k. 100% of the donations were given to local black-owned nonprofits and small businesses, BIPOC artist grants, and initiatives fighting for civic justice.
