Quiet Strength

Posted in Ethics, General Posts, Methods by Nathan Clendenin on February 10th, 2006

I worked with sister Margaret today. As I hoped, she needed to spend time at the hospice (instead of in the office building). I am impressed with her quiet strength, which she displays through leadership of her staff and caring for the patients with grace. I photographed her working for awhile, and did an audio interview. She spoke to me in English, unlike many of the other interviews. However, I will likely still have a voiceover for her because the room was unavoidably noisy (a constant beeping in the background and patients moaning a bit). Plus that will remain consistent with the other stories. I didn’t have to ask but one question to get all the information I wanted to cover. I photographed her working with patients a bit more, and she reminded me of the ones we had visited earlier in the week that were now here. One of the patients, a man with HIV who had an usuable arm due to a stroke, look much much better in the hospice. Another woman, looked worse. Margaret started to ask me what else I wanted, at which point I realized it was time to leave. I didn’t feel unwelcome, but she started to do things for me just so I could photograph, and so I stopped. There wasn’t much else to photograph anyway, otherwise I would have attempted to explain that I couldn’t photograph posed events. Instead I dropped it and started wrapping up. We had a nice goodbye and I could tell she was happy to have worked with me.