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A LIFE APART: THE TOLL OF OBESITY

Award-winning photojournalist Lisa Krantz chronicles the life of a morbidly

obese man in a way that is compassionate and compelling in equal measure.

Donatella Montrone finds out more about a photographer who allows

her subjects to tell their own story in their own way.

FEATURE

All images © Lisa Krantz

I

’m a knight in shining armour. I just don’t

have the armour – they don’t make it in

my size.’ These are the words of Hector

Garcia, spoken not long before his death

in late 2014 from chronic obstructive

pulmonary disease, a condition that often

afflicts the morbidly obese. It’s like drowning,

slowly. It’s when the lungs can’t get the air

they need to sustain a body like Hector’s, who

was some 550lbs when he collapsed on his

mother’s recliner and died, aged 49.

Photojournalist Lisa Krantz met Hector

four years prior to his death. Working as

a news photographer at the San Antonio

Express-News in Texas, she had been asked

to mentor a young student interested in

photography. That young student was

Hector’s niece; her mum was his sister

Rebecca. ‘A couple of weeks after talking

to me about mentoring her daughter,

Rebecca came to me about her brother,

Hector, hopeful that the Express-News

could do a story on him.’

Krantz, a one-time Pulitzer Prize finalist

and the recipient of numerous awards,

chronicled Hector’s life over a four-year

period in A Life Apart: The Toll of Obesity,

a photo series shortlisted for a Sony World

Photography Award in 2015, and a short

film of the same title, in which Hector

reveals, in his own devastating words, the

isolation of a life shackled to an armchair

• the life of someone with food addiction,
  debilitated by obesity. ‘I’m a person who
  relies on second opinions because the
  first opinion people have of me is that I’m
  fat and undisciplined. People rarely stick
  around to get to know me,’ said Hector,
  in Krantz’s 12-minute short.

‘Stories are everywhere,

explains Krantz, and those

living on the fringes of

society often lead the most

extraordinary lives.’

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