Ross Scott, John Williams, Mark Beehre and an unknown photographer

curated by Mark Beehre

Photospace Gallery
1st floor, 37 Courtenay Place, Wellington

18 July to 8 August 2025

Opening Thursday, 17 July, 5 to 7pm

Incidentaloma - curator's statement

"In medicine, an ‘incidentaloma’ is an unexpected finding on a scan done for some quite unrelated reason, small nodules that are usually nothing but need follow-up to make sure they don’t turn out to be cancerous. One day in the spring of 2010 when I got off my bike after cycling home my right thumb turned white, cold and painful. This was the third time that week, and the doctor in the Emergency Department suggested a CT scan of the aorta to see if there was anything there that might be causing clots to fly off and land in my thumb. There wasn’t, but what the scan did show was a small lesion, less than a centimetre, in the middle lobe of my right lung: an incidentaloma.

"‘It’s a scrappy little thing,’ said the respiratory colleague whom I consulted, but after the 18-month follow-up scan he was less sanguine. ‘This thing’s grown,’ he said in his mellifluous Welsh accent. ‘You’ll have to have it out.’ The surgeon I saw recommended a wedge resection, removing just enough lung to get rid of the lesion. Eleven days later my partner Ross and I sat in his office as he passed the pathologist’s report across the desk. ‘Sections of lung show adenocarcinoma … excision appears complete.’ He was kind and earnest in an awkward, schoolboyish sort of way, and later I said to my friends, ‘When I had cancer I didn’t want empathy or bedside manner. I wanted a surgeon with a sharp knife.’

"To maximise the chance of cure I was advised to go on and have a right middle lobectomy, removing all the part of the lung that had contained the tumour along with the regional lymph nodes. On 11 June 2012 I was back in hospital for this much bigger operation. I documented the whole process photographically. In the ward my friend John Williams and my partner Ross Scott took photographs, and in the operating theatre I gave a camera to the anaesthetic technician to record the surgery itself. The pictures tell the story."

- Mark Beehre, July 2025