A New World was created in reference to the new life my uncle has encountered due to years of illness. This past year was the hardest year yet. My uncle Chad was diagnosed with Lymphoma cancer in 2013. This past summer he underwent a bone marrow transplant where my mother was his transplant donor. His health seemed to be improving, but after 3 weeks, he was rushed back to the hospital where he was taken to ICU and placed on life support. After 3 months of being in the hospital, he was discharged home just in time for Christmas 2021.

I knew when going into this project that I wanted to create a piece where it didn’t show his sickness, but yet his personality because his sickness does not define him. He loves sports, watches, hats, and his family. Those are the aspects of his life that I wanted to capture. As he is mainly on bed rest, I wanted to draw focus to motion. While his physical progress seems to be slowly coming along, his life has been rapidly changing every second. I used a long exposure to capture this. I wanted to do something different to the images that correlated with family. There are two prints that are both overlaid. Shown in each of the two images are his daughter, who is kissing his cheek, and his wife, who is hugging him while smiling. I decided to overlap them because they are seen as one. I would like a viewer to seek this piece as an emphasis on how health can physically and mentally change a person. My uncle is still fighting and I want that to be recognized. He is not weak. He didn’t allow his illness to make him weak. Instead, he is becoming stronger day by day. My uncle is the strongest person I know and while this is a new world, he is making it better than his previous one.