Even so, we generally don’t fully understand what a cancer diagnosis, treatment and survivorship are really like until we go through them ourselves. Before that, we hear about ‘fighting the battle’, see #fuckcancer hashtags and go-fund-me pages, and know – in general terms – how tough treatments like chemotherapy can be. But we typically only see a fairly narrow representation of cancer in the media and get only small glimpses into the experiences of people who are living (and sometimes dying) with cancer. These glimpses rarely show the full picture of what day-to-day life with cancer is like – away from the hospital and back in ‘everyday’ life.

How do people experience cancer, not only as a ‘patient’, but as a mother, father, daughter, son, husband, wife, or grandparent: as a person at home, or at work, as a friend, neighbor, or member of the community?

We wanted to build a better understanding of what people actually go through when they’re living with cancer. This isn’t easy to document. It takes place both within and well beyond the walls of the hospital or clinic, can be quite private and is sometimes difficult to talk about or explain.

So, we gave some of the participants in our study a camera and asked them to show us, with photographs, what living with cancer was really like, for them.

The Picturing Cancer Survivorship study included volunteers from all walks of life, from young parents to elderly retirees, living with all sorts of different types of cancer – breast cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, bowel cancer and more. Each of these everyday Australians had a unique story, which they generously shared with us through their photos and subsequent in-depth interviews.

The result was this series of images, each accompanied by a caption or quote in the participants' own words. Together, they illustrate how cancer shapes people’s lives – for better and for worse – in varied, complex and nuanced ways. These photos show something meaningful about the wide variety of experiences of living with cancer by capturing some of the ideas, experiences, emotions, difficulties, and empowering moments that cancer brings with it.

We are sincerely grateful to the participants in our study who have made this collection possible by sharing their photographs and stories with us. We hope that in some small way, it reflects the variety and profundity of their experiences and the experiences of those around them. We are also grateful to our clinical collaborators, who cared for the study participants and their families at The Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital and Prince Charles Hospital.

Picturing Cancer Survivorship is part of ‘The Changing Landscapes of Survivorship’ - a multi-year research study supported by the Australian Research Council .