Ryan Parker photographed Dr. Anthony Fields and Dr. Michael Weinfeld for Best & Brightest, in the Fall / Winter 2025 issue of Leap, the Alberta Cancer Foundation’s magazine, and Dr. Fields again for the contents page.
The story
Best & Brightest
Marking 40 years of the Alberta Cancer Foundation, the feature asked four people working in Alberta’s cancer care how far treatment has come and how their careers grew here. Dr. Fields, a retired oncologist and MacEwan University’s first chancellor, joined the Cross Cancer Institute in 1980, led its expansion and helped create Alberta’s 11 community cancer centres. Dr. Weinfeld, a senior research scientist at the Cross, came to Edmonton with his lab 40 years ago and works in DNA repair, looking for ways to disrupt it in cancer cells so lower doses of radiation can do the same job.
- Magazine
- Leap, the Alberta Cancer Foundation
- Issue
- Fall / Winter 2025
- Ran as
- The contents page, the feature’s opening spread, and Dr. Weinfeld’s page
- Words
- Doug Horner
- Art direction
- Veronica Cowan
- Photographs
- Ryan Parker
As printed
The cover, and the pages.
01Leap, Fall / Winter 2025
The frames
The photographs, before the type.
01The photographs
How it got made
The brief, the room, the frame.
Two doctors, two very different days. Dr. Weinfeld gave me his lab at the Cross and the garden outside it, and sent a phone photo of the lab ahead of time so I could plan the light.
For Dr. Fields I drove about an hour out to his rustic cabin on a lake. I’d photographed him once before, in 2019, in my studio with the stools and the banker’s chair for one of my first Leap shoots, so it was really cool to see him again after all these years and spend more time with him on his own. He told me about his life and showed me pictures of where he grew up; the cabin is decorated in the spirit of his homeland. Later the client asked for a more autumn feel on his frame, so I pushed the foliage towards fall.
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