"What I see before I go to sleep: A Night Visitor," Francesca Danielli

review by ANNA STEWART
     It’s easy to understand how Project 10 works as therapy: take 10 women living with breast cancer, give them cameras and let them make photographs following 10 directives: your face, something red, something you’ll miss, and so on.

     But how does Project 10 — a MICA student’s senior thesis that became a HopeWell Cancer Support program — work as art? We checked out the show (hanging now at Hopewell’s Lutherville campus) and were impressed by the range of imagery. Some of the photographs were straightforward and poignant while others were more complex and viscerally affecting.

       ”What I see before I go to sleep: A Night Visitor,” for example, was riveting.

     Project 10 was the brainchild of Maryland Institute College of Art graduate Julia Kim Smith, whose good friend Francesca Danielli was diagnosed with breast cancer while Smith was still a student. The idea is to take ten definitive things or concepts and have breast cancer patients combine photography and journaling to express them in a personal and unique way. Project 10 has since expanded [from its roots at MICA] to become an ongoing program at HopeWell, open to anyone there with breast cancer.

     The ten directives include broad concepts that anyone can photograph. But the idea is to allow the women to achieve deeply personal expression using art as a forum to discuss life, their cancer and mortality. More importantly, for people living with metastatic cancer, having the ability to create art gives them the power to reclaim their lives from their disease, through humor and inner reflection.

     Danielli had the opportunity to participate in the project with the original ten artists. Her images, although taken with a low resolution digital camera, are striking and interesting.

     “What I see before I go to sleep: A Night Visitor,” shows a man in a dark room sitting on the edge of the bed, a black cover over his mouth, with his legs curiously folded in front of him creating the illusion of disembodiment, misconstruing the spatial plane. The figure could really be a grisly depiction of death: the idea of which visits us at night when we are alone in the dark and the contemplation of a pure ending is most terrifying.

      Many photos in the Project 10 collection are touching in their humanity but this is one of the few which truly transports the viewer into what it’s like to be facing death on a daily basis. This image is shocking in its simplicity and straightforward expression of isolation and fear.

Clara Behar, self portrait.

     Other women participating in Project 10 photographed objects and people who are a part of their daily routine using a simple point and click digital camera—honest images that allow the viewer to step into their lives. Clara Behar, one of the featured artists, took a series of very poignant and emotional photographs throughout her treatment and time at HopeWell. Many of Clara’s images take on greater meaning after one reads the accompanying text, in which she discusses her cancer’s psychological impact.

     As those who knew her told me, Clara was witty and intelligent; a beautiful woman who inspired many who came into contact with her through the HopeWell community. When Clara was informed that the cancer had spread to her brain in the spring of 2005, she was devastated—and aptly photographed her face in the midst of shock and grief. What results is an image that is almost as difficult to look at as it was for Clara to accept that her breast cancer had regrouped and was now attacking her mind. In this way, Clara, like many of the other women in Project 10, became an artist by her dedication to following through with a conceptual idea and making it more than a project but part of her life journey.

     Project 10 is one of many classes and group organizations operating out of HopeWell’s new facility in a renovated Amish barn. The program is free and open to women with breast cancer who are currently in treatment or diagnosed in the past three years. To find out more information about HopeWell or the Project 10 collaboration, see their website at hopewellcancersupport.org.  Some of the other Project 10 photographs are viewable here.