They brought a wedding ring and a boxing robe and a jacket that says “Daddy’s Girl 4eva.” They brought a model ship and a golf club and a camera. They brought a sweatshirt, a sonogram, blankets. They brought photographs. They brought stuffed animals. They brought memories.
Starting last October, a group of local adults and children who experienced grief joined darkroom photography students at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) to collaborate on an exhibit that aimed to destigmatize grief. Now, the results of their collective effort are on display at the Carberry Fine Arts Gallery at STCC until Friday, Feb. 6. A public reception for the “Faces of Grief” exhibit will take place on Saturday, Jan. 31, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
The show involved participants in grief programs at Cooley Dickinson VNA & Hospice and members of the STCC community, plus students in STCC’s ART 250 class. Each subject, or “sitter,” was photographed holding, wearing or showing an object related to loved ones who have passed away.
For Joel Walker of Granby, that object was one of his wife’s paintings.
Walker lost his wife Deborah, a watercolor artist, in January 2025. After her passing, he discovered “stacks and stacks” of her watercolor paintings at their home — around 150. He’s spent the last year mounting and framing them, and he chose one, an image of lighthouses, to show in “Faces of Grief.”
Walker learned about “Faces of Grief” through a walking group at Cooley Dickinson VNA & Hospice, led by bereavement coordinator Shelly Bathe Lenn. Group members gather on the second and fourth Fridays of the month at Look Park in Northampton to walk and talk to other adults about grief and loss.
“When someone close to you passes away — for me, it was terrible. It was a devastating experience, and being able to face the world — very difficult. … I found talking to other people on the walks and a project like this gives me an opportunity,” Walker said. “People will see my picture with my wife’s art and they’ll ask me about it, so it gives me an opportunity to tell them … about my wife, which I love doing.”
Lenn started this project because she wanted to help the people she supports find ways to commemorate their loved ones beyond a funeral or a celebration of life. She reached out to STCC in the fall of 2024 and connected to Sondra Peron, arts and humanities professor at the college as well as the gallery coordinator for the Carberry Fine Arts Gallery and the program coordinator for the school’s Fine Arts program.
“Once I figured out that there was a photography program, [I thought] ‘Oh, wait, there could be multiple levels of success here, where students could get experience with portrait-taking; since they work with analog photography, they can get experience with developing the pictures, and then the sitters themselves can do some reflection around their person or their people,” Lenn said, “so it’s trifold.”
While Peron’s teaching background made photography a natural fit, she and Lenn were specifically drawn to the analog process; unlike modern digital snapshots, film demands a level of mindfulness that resonates with the gravity of grief.
“In 2026, we all have cameras. We’re all walking around with cameras all the time. But darkroom photography and using film slows students down, so that then, they have to think a little bit more critically about the decisions they’re making when they’re taking a picture,” Peron said. “‘What am I going to do if I only have 36 exposures? I have 36 opportunities on a roll. What am I going to take a picture of? How am I going to make it count?’ So my role as an educator is bringing in that mindfulness to the art of photography.”
Peron and Lenn were both sitters in the exhibition as well.
“I was never planning to be a subject in this, but then when I’m demonstrating how to do the photoshoots and everything and how to change film and then I’m sitting — and I have my grandfather’s camera on campus all the time in my office — I was like, ‘Well, this is a moment for me to also reflect on what loss means, and how have I managed it or not managed it?’ Because part of this whole thing was about destigmatizing grief, and I’m doing that vis-a-vis the camera. I’m doing that vis-a-vis photography, and everyone’s doing it in a different way,” Peron said. “But we were able to capture, I think, some of that with how people do it differently.”
The exhibit doesn’t credit the individual photographers for each sitter’s “suite” of photos, as Peron calls them, because multiple photographers photographed each sitter. Instead, each suite features the name of the sitter, often the name(s) of the person (or people) they’re grieving, and, in many cases, accompanying text.
For Christine Biegner of Easthampton, that text was a poem she wrote, inspired by her husband Michael Biegner’s time of death: 10:30 p.m. on April 21, 2021. Michael, who was a poet, died of stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer. His death plan included a specific request: that someone should record the time he took his last breath and turn it into a poem, which inspired a number of his family members, friends and fellow participants in his writing group to do just that.
“In that way, the echo of my breath at least will be recorded for posterity,” he’d written. “That is something, isn’t it?”
Biegner finished her poem in June 2021. In it, she chronicles their life together post-diagnosis — holidays, renewed marriage vows and joy at their daughter’s wedding, days filled with an intent “to hold on tightly to each other; to be present and to lean into love.”
“We bore witness as you left this earth and us,” she wrote, “heartbroken but grateful for every moment.”
The items Biegner was photographed with included her husband’s last journal, his Blackwing pencils, a pencil roll and an anthology that she and a friend had put together of about 200 of Michael’s poems. Biegner said she was nervous before the shoot, but the class put her at ease.
“I didn’t really know what to expect, but Sondra and the students were so welcoming. I could sense that they understood what kind of a project this was. They were gentle. They knew that they were dealing with grieving people, and they understood that there was a lot of love involved,” she said. “I’m always trying to find a way to honor Michael and his memory, and by sharing a little bit of him with others, it just makes me happy.”
Paula Cleary of Florence lost her husband, Dr. Kenneth Pompilli, to pancreatic cancer last March.
“He fought his battle with so much dignity,” she said, “and I admire how strong he was.”
To accompany her photos — one of which includes her holding a framed photo of him, another of which shows her wrapping herself in one of his sweaters — Cleary chose two poems. One is about grief. The other is her own writing, a series of “whispers” to her husband.
“I softly whisper thank yous every night. / Hoping you catch at least one of them. / Thank you for loving me. / Thank you for the sound of your laugh. / Thank you for the comfort of your voice. / Thank you for being my home,” she wrote. “Thank you for all the little things that were so important. / Thank you for being mine to miss.”
Roslyn Helfen of Easthampton, who lost her husband Sydney Helfen to Parkinson’s disease, was photographed with a number of items that he owned, including a T-shirt from their former canoe club that she put over a pillow to use as a comfort item. She, too, said that the class helped make her feel welcome.
“I felt like a movie star with everyone taking photographs and posing,” Helfen said. “It was lovely because people were interested, and I felt cared for — that everyone cared, and this mattered, and it does.”
The Carberry Fine Arts Gallery is located in Building 28 at the ground floor by Pearl Street and take the elevator up to the first floor. Admission to the gallery is free. The gallery is open Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Tuesday and Thursday, 1 p.m.-5 p.m.
For more information about Cooley Dickinson’s bereavement programs, visit cooleydickinson.org/programs-services/vna-hospice.
