Beyond Fear gathers ninety-six pages of Caroline Seymour’s photographs into what the publisher calls her first photo-novel, published by Dewi Lewis in 2024. The subject is cancer, but the book does not confine itself to illness. Seymour follows patients and their families through diagnosis and treatment, treating each response as distinct even where the clinical stages converge. Her concern is the entire life a diagnosis enters, not the disease alone.
The approach is deliberate and unhurried. Seymour describes the onlooker’s position as a privileged one, and she declines to sensationalise what she records. The images confront the body under surgical care without converting pain into spectacle; the publisher frames them as a search for beauty in wounds that are both primal and human. Running alongside the photographs are details of paintings and sculpture drawn from UK national collections, a device that sets the medical present against a longer art-historical frame. Religious references recur and carry weight, underscoring the humanity of the patients and the fact of their suffering.
That doubling of registers — clinical and art-historical — is the book’s distinctive move. It also informs its other subject: the skill, dedication and compassion of the surgeons attempting to heal. The series has been exhibited in galleries, and in 2024 it travels to the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Glasgow and London and to Balliol College, Oxford. An introduction by the British-American musician, producer and writer James Ginzburg accompanies the plates.
For collectors, the appeal lies less in any claimed scarcity than in the structure of the object itself. Seymour is credited as both photographer and author, and the publisher’s credit information is complete; the photographs are hers. A clothbound hardback of 96 pages, 76 duotone plates, 220 by 245 millimetres, it is a considered piece of bookmaking rather than a document assembled after the fact. Its subject is difficult, its handling restrained, and its combination of contemporary photography with historical works gives it a reach beyond the single case it records.
