Ryan Parker photographed Joan Hauber, who manages Alberta’s Screen Test breast screening program, for True Calling, in the Fall / Winter 2025 issue of Leap, the Alberta Cancer Foundation’s magazine.
The story
True Calling
Joan Hauber took a clerk’s job with Screen Test, Alberta’s breast cancer screening program, in 1991, meaning it as a stopgap after a biology degree, and nearly 35 years later she manages it for the whole province. She has watched its mobile service grow from vans that set up temporary clinics, with darkrooms for the film, to digital trailers, a move she helped oversee in 2009. Today Screen Test runs a permanent clinic in Edmonton and two new trailers that reach 120 rural communities a year.
- Magazine
- Leap, the Alberta Cancer Foundation
- Issue
- Fall / Winter 2025
- Ran as
- The opening two-page spread
- Words
- Elizabeth Chorney-Booth
- 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.
It was a tight window, but I was up for it. The story was about Joan’s career, and her screening trailer was part of it, but the trailer was out of commission at a trucking yard, waiting on repairs and not yet registered to leave the lot. The yard moved it to the middle and cleaned it up for us. Anything pulled back to show the whole unit in a trucking lot was less than appealing, so we kept it tight and shot Joan outside, from a low angle, with the repair shop out of the frame.
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