DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY
Maranie Staab: Photo Documentary
Since her ALS diagnosis, Hanna has lived into an ethos of “stubborn joy” and a will to “live fully while dying.”
…We reminisced about that March moonrise and spoke of returning to her favorite spot. A long pause carried unspoken questions about time, energy, and health. We all sensed such adventures might belong to the past. Hanna cut through the silence with a promise: “You’ll find me there.”
How love in action provides an example of what is possible as we “walk each other home.”
“Imagine if tomorrow everyone on the margins woke with garlands of flowers and prayers and incense around them. Imagine their joy as they stepped or rolled or stumbled into a world so tightly woven together in reverence for life that they never feared slipping through the cracks ever again.”
Hanna du Plessis, in Bedsores and Bliss
For nearly two years Maranie Staab has continued to document moments of life for Hanna and the Careforce community—an ongoing visual witness to what it looks like to live fully while dying.
The images show what most people never see: morning routines with caregivers, celebrations of small victories, bodies holding bodies, community showing up day after day. Hanna laughing. Hanna exhausted. Hanna with ventilator, communication device, the people who lift and turn and feed and love her. The photographs refuse to look away.
This isn’t tragedy documentation. It’s life documentation—not sanitized, not romanticized, but real. The images hold both the devastation and the stubborn joy. Maranie’s lens shows “love in action” meeting the daunting tasks inherent in dying, wrapping Hanna in what she calls “an expansive, loving embrace.”
The ongoing series provides what Maranie describes as “an example of what is possible as we ‘walk each other home.'” It’s a chronicle of chosen family stepping in where systems fail, of community as antidote to hiding disability and death.