Ryan Parker photographed Dr. Lindsay Rowe for the cover of Leap, the Alberta Cancer Foundation’s magazine, in Spring 2024, and for the feature inside, Research Rockstar.
The story
Research Rockstar
Dr. Rowe is a radiation oncologist and clinical researcher at the University of Alberta and the Cross Cancer Institute. Her work is PSMA-PET, an imaging technique that shows where prostate cancer has spread far more clearly than a CT scan or an MRI, so radiation can go exactly where it’s needed. The Alberta Cancer Foundation funds two of her trials, one of them enrolling 300 Alberta men with high-risk prostate cancer over five years.
She was photographed at the Cross, in the imaging suite where the research happens.
- Magazine
- Leap, the Alberta Cancer Foundation
- Issue
- Spring 2024
- Ran as
- The cover, and the feature across three pages
- Words
- Keri Sweetman
- Art direction
- Veronica Cowan
- Photographs
- Ryan Parker
As printed
The cover, and the pages.
01Leap, Spring 2024
The frames
The photographs, before the type.
01The photographs
How it got made
The brief, the room, the frame.
Leap avoids studio shots where it can, and the clinical spaces came with a rule: masks on wherever patients might be. So I made a last-minute gamble and started Dr. Rowe’s shoot in my studio, unmasked, before we went to the Cross, where the linac vault had taken six weeks to book and was only free after 5:30. I struggled to find anywhere there that the mask could come off.
I lit the vault myself, with a snoot, one of my favourite tools, and some coloured continuous light in the background. There was already a blue cast in the room, so I leaned into it and pushed more blue. I left one of my lights behind the linac overnight. The feature was a finalist at the 2025 Alberta Magazine Awards, my first nomination.
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