Malta-born photojournalist Darrin Zammit Lupi worked at Times of Malta between 1996 and 2016 and has been a contract photographer with global news agency Reuters since 1997. His work over the past two decades has taken him all over the world, during which time he covered the Bosnian war, the Kosovo refugee crisis, the South-East Asia tsunami, the Libyan conflict, development issues in various parts of Africa, and several other international assignments. His work has been widely published in the international press, including TIME, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Paris Match, and others. His work covering documenting the plight and tragedy of migrants trying to reach European shores from Africa, culminated in the publication of his book Isle Landers in 2014, with its accompanying exhibition being seen in Malta, France, Luxembourg, Portugal, Australia, Japan and the U.S. More recently he took a step back from covering stories and travelling as he cared for and documented his teenage daughter fighting a losing battle against cancer.
I took the first photo of my daughter, Rebecca, moments after she was born on August 3, 2005. Barely more than 15 years later, I took the last photo of my daughter moments after she died, of cancer, on January 3, 2021. I’m a photojournalist. It was only natural that I documented just about every moment of the beautiful life of Becs, as my wife, Marisa, and I called her. Like the time she was 2 and her face looks lit up from within. Harder, much harder, was documenting her illness and death from a rare and extremely aggressive form of bone cancer. Like the time she sat in darkness receiving IV fluids after a chemotherapy session, her long and lovely dark hair a memory. The time she hugged her teddy bear Snuggles tight as she slept in her hospital room in the middle of a terrible series of procedures we hoped could save her. And the time her mother wept over her body moments after Becs died, the freckles on her face a cruel symbol of her youth and beauty. Becs’ battle was made even worse by a global pandemic that brought paranoia over the possibility of infecting her compromised immune system, anxiety over medical supply chains and, worst of all, separation at a time when togetherness was what we needed most. NOTE: Most of the project was shot in 2020-2021, with the first two images of Becs’ childhood, in 2005 and 2007. One of the images, showing me lying down next to Becs as she faded away, was taken by Marisa after I asked to shoot it in a certain way from a particular angle. It was not set up or posed in any way.
