This is my mom and she’s one of the greatest human beings I know.  It’s hard to write about people you love because there so many things you want to cover from the bad times and the good times that happen between you and them. Lately, it’s been even harder.

My mom was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma cancer back in May. For the past two months, she’s been receiving radiation treatments for her cancer. However, since the beginning of this month, my mom’s cancer turned out to be more aggressive than we thought. Her doctor is now moving her into chemotherapy.

I’ve been private about it until this point, I decided to pick up my camera not planning or caring whether they’ll be good or bad. I’ve seen a few photographers that have documented family sickness. It’s seemed as a outlet for them. For me, it’s something I can’t fathom in words.

My parents and my aunt from Paris, France came to visit me this past weekend. I took them around town getting Dim Sum and showed my aunt where I worked and lived. I was happy that my mom was getting out because I bet she’s been bored sitting around the house. She brought her medical papers for me to read because she doesn’t quite understand English. We talked about things she may encounter during her chemotherapy, which she’s still scared of. I asked if I can take her photo and she covered her neck not wanting me to get her scar.

I finally convinced her, telling her that it’s just a mark to remind us of the battles we are fighting or fought in our lives and how we come to overcome / deal with them.

The scar is how they found the cancer. She had a large throat cyst that had to be surgically removed. Once it was removed, the doctor did some test on it and found cells that was cancerous. Then it started from there.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain

The visual arts are about communication. If I was talking about my work, I wouldn’t purposefully try and be obscure, I would do my best to be eloquent and communicate properly. When I’m creating a piece of work, it’s the same thing. I don’t like that removal from the audience of a piece of work; the artist who created it isn’t in touch with his audience anymore and the audience are trying to figure out what the fuck it’s about, and it’s still put onto a pedestal in that triumphant kind of way. I hate that kind of arrogance. What I enjoy doing is communicating with an audience and letting that audience communicate with me.

With the advent of the internet over the last ten years or so, being able to be in touch with your audience has become a much more real part of creating a piece of work. I can take a picture on my mobile phone and have it published globally within five seconds, without anybody saying ‘Well, it’s OK but it’s not going to make any money.’ Before, there were all these systems set up, be it contemporary art galleries, record companies, film companies, magazines, whatever, all set up in a way that work could be only be justified if someone was making money out of it. It’s not necessarily about the merit of the work whether you could make 1/2 million Euros out of it and it therefore being worth showing. What the internet has done is taken all of that away, so if a piece of work is good then people will at it, and if it’s not good then they won’t. I like that democratization.

-Nick Knight