Jeffrey’s story: a lifetime of looking closely

Jeffrey is an ethnographic photographer who’s spent more than 50 years traveling to document the lives of Indigenous peoples across the Americas. These days, the 83-year old sits at his desk doing a different kind of work: sorting, labeling, and organizing his photographs so he can give them away to museums and organizations as a gift. “Every time I take a picture, a little piece stays in my brain,” he says. The beauty in certain images still moves him, and giving them away feels right—a way of honoring the trust people placed in him.

Jeffrey is also a chordoma survivor whose experience with this disease began in 1999, when leg pain led him to a specialist and ultimately a sacral chordoma diagnosis. In the decades since, he’s undergone five surgeries, proton beam therapy, and a clinical trial, and coped with the long road of practical challenges that can follow removal of the coccyx. Today he’s living with advanced disease. And chordoma is only one part of Jeffrey’s health story: In 1986, he was diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, a disease that gradually damaged the nerves in his legs.

Over time, his mobility changed, moving from a walking stick, to a walker, and eventually to a wheelchair. But Jeffrey’s focus tends to be less on what has been taken away and more on how he can adapt.

That instinct has been with him a long time. Jeffrey has dyslexia and was never a strong student, and after college he struggled to find his footing in the working world. What he loved was seeing: appreciating light, viewing the city in compositions, studying people and the essence of small gestures. Eventually he bought a camera and took a solo trip to Bimini, teaching himself from the camera’s manual as he went. When he came home, he enrolled in a photography career school and began building what would become his life’s work.

Over the decades, Jeffrey’s career took him into Indigenous communities, including many trips in the 1980’s to Chiapas, Mexico to photograph Mayan families and artists of the loom. He approached people with humility and patience, learning early that the best images come when you don’t try to control the scene. Instead of directing families, he focused on earning trust, staying out of the way, and letting life unfold. “To be ignored was the highest compliment,” he says; “It gave the work cultural integrity.”

Now, recognizing the value of those images in these rapidly changing times, he decided to gift his archive to numerous museums. Today’s digital tools have made that decision even more meaningful: museums are putting the photos online, where young Maya can see their ancestors in daily life and formal portraits. Cultures change, and some traditions fade under the stress of modern life. But Jeffrey hopes these photographs can offer something lasting: a legacy record made with care.

In recent years, Jeffrey has stayed connected to photography, his life’s purpose, and the recollection of beauty and adventures in his pictures. He says that the Chordoma Foundation is part of that sense of connection, too. He’s appreciated finding clear, reliable information when he needs it, but what’s meant the most is the relationship he’s built with Kenny Brighton, our Head of Philanthropy. What began as a spontaneous phone call between the two has become an ongoing friendship, with regular conversations that range from the practical to the profound. Jeffrey’s connection to Kenny carries a specific kind of reassurance: knowing that when research progress turns into a practical new option for patients like him, someone will make sure he hears about it.

As Jeffrey looks ahead, he’s staying immersed in work he loves, and choosing generosity as a way of moving through the world. In sharing his photographs, he’s creating an admirable legacy: giving the world something that lasts.