After a vote, we narrowed down the list to the top five winners.
Karen Anzalone, Grand-Prize Winner-Photo, "Reflections of My Father".
Anzalone submitted a picture of her father, John Ferrara Jr., who passed away from COPD in November 2010. The picture depicts her father looking out onto an invisible horizon, with a superimposed image of his 17-year-old self in the photo.
“When I look at that picture, I really think back to what was going on in his mind. There’s so much I wish he had shared with me. It makes me sad to think of what he was battling with,” she says. “I look at pictures much more closely now—it’s as if I’m looking at them with a totally different set of eyes. What I once took for granted, now I’m seeing so much more in pictures.”
Anzalone says this picture captures her father’s essence because he was a very reflective person. “I’ve always loved this photo, but I never really thought about it until a?er he died. It makes me think he’s reflecting upon a time when he was 17, thinking about the mistakes he’d made and his past,” she says. “He had always reflected upon his life, but he did especially when he was diagnosed with COPD in 2004.”
Eugene White Sr., Second Place Winner — Video, “Thee OxGnator”
In the beginning of White’s video,scrolling text says, “There was a darkness, a void of light.” “That’s how I felt.Last September [when I was diagnosed], it hit me, and I went into a darkness. But then the light came, and thatwas the people I met online and in workshops,” he says.
White says he felt like a prisoner in his own home, only being able to leave the house for three hours at a time because of his oxygen. Thiis April, White received his first portable oxygen concentrator, and one of the first things he did was go to the beach to watch the sunrise, a moment that he captured in his video.
Traci Snyder—Drawing, “Zentangle
Drawing,” and Anna Boyer — Poem, “Days in
the Life of a COPD Emphysema Patient,”
Third Place Winners.
“I was diagnosed in 2000, and in 2007 I was told I would need a double lung transplant. I’ve been on the list for 15 months now,” Snyder says.
During her hospital stays at Barnes-Jewish in St. Louis, MO, Snyder began taking zentangle classes. Zentangle is the method of creating images from repetitive patterns, increasing a person’s focus and creativity. “I started zentangling to keep my mind busy—it helps me relax. I am at 25 percent lung capacity and have a hard time breathing, and The other third place winner, Boyer, wrote a poem which has a line that reads, “The only answer that she knows is to just fight for as long as she can.”
Diagnosed in May 2008, Boyer says this poem helps her deal with her COPD because it “allows me to do the thing that always gave me comfort.” “I have always loved writing and it has always been a release for me whether I am sad, happy, anxious or depressed. Now I do it in my new ‘normal’ state of having COPD,” she says. “This poem allows escapism and pessimism and most of all determination to continue to fight the fight.”
Catharine Ahearn, Fourth Place Winner —
Painting, “Satire of old Tareyton Cigarette Ads”
Ahearn created this piece to satirize the old Tareyton Cigarette ads, which she says, brazenly advertised smoking back in the 1960s.
“A lot of my work has sarcasm and satire in it, so I thought it was interesting because in today’s world, you’re not allowed to advertise cigarettes, and back then it was so flagrant,” she says.
Old Tareyton Cigarette ads used to have the slogan, “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!”—hence the black eyes on the faces of the people in Ahearn’s rendition. Inspired by family members who battled lung cancer and her boyfriend’s mother who has COPD, Ahearn said she was honored to have placed in the COPD Foundation’s Summer Art Challenge.
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