Dexter's Story

Dexter Spencer is a two year old boy born with cerebral palsy and recently diagnosed with liver cancer. This is his story.

{**Multimedia video at the very bottom)

This family has an incredible story of love and strength that I’ve had the opportunity to share. Because this work has gotten such a strong response, it has been recreated in several different forms– a multimedia video (which is what I was originally shooting for), a photo essay, and an InDesign page for the school newspaper’s ‘In Focus’. I feel like nothing I write here will fully be able to sum up my experience working on this story... but here goes. The first set of pictures I have of Dexter are the bathtub ones, where he had just finished surgery and has fresh stitches in his stomach. It kind of hit me hard as a first real encounter with a sick child... but I guess I held my composure by ‘hiding behind the camera’ and being so involved in simply getting the photos. I remember Lisa saying in a very soft and loving manner how the scars ‘look a lot worse than they are’. That kind of set the mood for the rest of the work, because as my photographs hopefully show, the love Dan and Lisa have for their child almost, overbears, the scariness of the situation. I had a lot of people come up to me and ask how I had the stomach to work on this story. Some of it had to do with the fact (as I mentioned before) that I was so caught up in just getting the photos that I didn’t really have the time to think or really take things in. It wasn’t until afterwards, when I was editing the photos, I felt the reality of the story. I’ve also had people ask me why I chose to produce the work in black and white. For the record, Dexter’s Story is the first piece of work that I’d ever edited in black and white, and my reasoning behind it is quite simple. It felt right to me. In colour, the pictures were almost too intense and gaudy, which is a weird way was distracting and actually took away from the story, I think. Looking at the photos, I also wanted this story to be a ‘thing of the past’ when family and friends of Dexter saw it, and black and white helps create this feeling of nostalgia. 

Cars and Scars Multimedia 

Untitled from Leah Myers on Vimeo.