Photos and cancer

By Joana Roig Borrell

In the Vanguardia I found an interesting article about teenagers who had cancer or had suffered this from illness and took photos about their world. A group of experienced monitors, aged over eighteen, helped these teenagers in photography workshops, where they shared a lot of experiences and interacted with them. The teenagers talked about their experiences in hospital or the beginning of their current life after the illness. These photographs are collected in the book called "A través de mi cámara", presented a day before the International Children’s Cancer Day. The photos are accompanied by short texts about the sick teenagers’ thoughts, questions and hopes, and those of their parents and the professionals who treated them. The book shows real pictures of the pain, but also of the joy and hope, with the objective of communicating emotions, as the workshop co-ordinator Mario Rodríguez said. We think that these initiatives are useful in order for society to become aware of this illness, and they also they show that a lot of teenager and childhood cancers can be cured.