Kris Hallenga
This has taken months to publish. I wanted to write this epic blog post about Kris, but the truth is, every time I opened this draft, I crumbled into tears. I can’t find the words, so I just decided to just let it go this morning. It’s not what I’d hoped it would be, but that’s ok. Plenty of incredible eulogies have been written by people far better with words than I.
I shot this pic at Kris’s 10 year Cancer-versary party. 2019
It’s so fucking hard to get my head around Kris leaving us. Despite living with stage 4 cancer for 15 years, I believed Kris would outlive me, nay, all of us. Such was her energy, her fucking lifeforce…
Beachbreak Live 2010
The above pic was taken a few seconds after meeting Kris.
I was walking across a field at Beachbreak Live Festival 2010, doing the usual atmos photos, and Kris walked past, I stopped her and asked to take this pic. Kris invited me to hang out at the Coppafeel Boob tent, and we became friends almost immediately. A month later, we bumped into each other at the Secret Garen Party, and that cemented the friendship. I Can’t remember when they moved to Cornwall, but having Kris and Maren (Kris’s identical twin) down here made a huge difference to me as a single parent. Pops and I would often visit and hang out for hours when they were working their coffee wagon ‘Beyoncé’. I even shot Kris, Mar and Beyonce for the Sunday Times!
Kris, Mar, and Beyonce shot in 2021 for Relative Values, Sunday Times
Photographing Kris over the years seemed like a pretty normal process, she was a rock star, her and Maren’s charity Coppafeel, put them both firmly in the limelight. so over the years the photoshoots added up! The first one after becoming friends, was one which I self commissioned, for the now defunct New British magazine. The mag collapsed before this feature made it to the pages, and thus the interview (me n kris chatting) has remained as an audio file on my computer for years, I’m hoping to transcribe it soon, but Iv’e found that process quite difficult.
Kris at home shot for The New British, London, 2013
In 2020 I was commissioned by Land and Water to shoot a series on people who work or play in the outdoors. Naturally, Kris came to mind. She and Mar introduced me to SUPing (which, in conversation, I thought they wanted to go to the pub, Yorkshire slang :) - so we headed off to Kris’ favourite spot and spent the afternoon shooting. The whole shoot can be found here. I knew that Kris hadn’t liked the pictures from the shoot, and for a year or so I wondered why, and then Kris wrote this on Instagram….
I feel like surviving cancer or living with cancer comes with some unwritten conditions and expectations. If I am to survive cancer I must never not be grateful for every… single… day. If I am to be granted a long life with cancer I must never not love my body.
This is bullshit. And it plays into how honest cancer patients feel they can be about the realities of the disease. It doesn’t give space for the shit days, it makes us “fight” when all we want to say is “enough”. It creates annoying terms like “warrior” and it erodes a persons truths.
Why am I saying all this? Well, this photo has been brought back into my consciousness (thanks @landandwater_ 😉) and the reason I didn’t share it when it was taken (last summer) is because I didn’t like how my body looked. When I re-shared a post from Land & Water the other day on my stories, that used this photo, a few of you told me how stunning it was. It made me look at it again, properly. My body changes constantly because of different treatments and so does my love for it. When I first saw this picture last year I didn’t like it. Sometimes it takes other people to show you what you can not see yourself. Sometimes it just takes time.
I can be grateful to not be dead and still not love my body and how it looks every day. The great thing about us humans is that our thoughts and feelings about things can change, so I can hold on to the belief that I won’t always feel the way I do in that moment.
Ultimately, there are no rules to surviving cancer or any sort of turd. In fact
cancer likes to make up the rules as it goes along so WE CAN TOO.
📷 the photo was taken by @dannynorthphoto for @landandwater_ . I loved this shoot and I love Danny and today I love my body. Tomorrow I might not like my body and I might think danny is a knob.”
My favorite shot is a simple portrait of Kris in the water. It was everything I’d hoped to capture. It felt authentic. I’m pretty sure for the reasons listed above, at the time, Kris hated it and maybe even called me a knob for publishing the photo.
I’m going to leave this here. Fuck me, it’s an understatement to say Kris brought so much joy to people's lives; her presence was MONOLITHIC. My heart broke when she left us, and the last time I saw her back in February, she gave me a present, a neon sign that perfectly sums it up.
