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Photo David Young
Black & white
Three men from regional Australia. All in their mid-fifties to early sixties, they look fine. They had cancer.
Photo David Young
Three blokes.
Nothing to prove — everything is already proven.
Steven, Russell and Gareth are in their fifties and sixties. They live in regional Australia. They look like men you know, or maybe you know one of them. They look fine.
They had cancer.
A thing that grows quietly while you're getting on with life — working, worrying, not saying much. It doesn't announce itself until it's made itself at home in your body and refuses to leave.
They each went to the doctor. That decision — an uncomfortable, inconvenient, slightly awkward decision — is probably why they're still here.
There's a cost. Russell can't hear quite as well as he used to. Steven and Gareth are navigating things in their private lives that nobody talks about. All three are living with a tradeoff: some things lost, the rest of their lives gained.
They're not broken. They're not asking for sympathy.
They're asking you to listen to your body, and if it doesn't feel or sound right, make the call.
What the body keeps secret, the body eventually reveals. Three men stand in their stoicism — arms crossed, chests bare, the posture of men who don't like to complain or overshare. And yet here they are. Not with words. With presence and the simple act of being visible.
Somewhere inside the biology of each of them, some cells rewrote their own instructions, and went rogue. The human body, that quiet country, had started a war with itself beneath the surface of skin and flesh and blood and muscle and bone. The lie of male health is too often that looking fine means being fine.
In November and December 2025, Steven and Gareth had surgery to remove Gleason score 9 prostate cancers, aggressive and high risk. For seven weeks, five days a week from August to September 2025, Russell underwent intensive chemo-radiotherapy to treat T2N1M0 oropharyngeal cancer of the tonsil. Precision radiation and a powerful chemical compound that binds to the DNA of cancer cells, triggering their death. Each diagnosis was different. Each treatment exacted its price.
They paid different prices for survival. Russell lost the taste of food for months — the sensory, nutritious pleasure of a meal was missing, the social ritual of eating became a chore, where food was medicine. He experienced acute fatigue, weight loss, and hearing impairment. He drew on dietary guidance, speech therapy, and onco-psychology. Most of those effects receded. Some did not.
Steven and Gareth both had their prostate cancers removed successfully. They were stoic through painful recovery, and have now recovered well. But both have experienced post-surgical erectile dysfunction — a consequence that carries its own weight of silence, one that touches personal relationships and identity in ways that medicine can name but culture rarely discusses openly.
These are not small losses. They are not mentioned in polite company. They are mentioned here because silence is a kind of symptom.
What remains is quiet and durable: the decision to act, the will to still be here, the exposed vulnerability of standing in front of a camera to let the story be seen. The photographer who made this image, David Young, is a cancer advocate who is also living with cancer. The image is an act of solidarity.
They Had Cancer is a project for men who might think they're fine, dismiss a sore throat, a lump or a painful twinge where there once wasn't one, who might avoid the doctor, and believe their health is a private matter between themselves and the grave. It is a project that hopes to interrupt that belief before it becomes the last one they hold.
This is what cancer survival looks like. It looks like three ordinary men. It looks like nothing and everything.
Talk to your GP about prostate cancer screening, head and neck checks, and men's health. It is not weakness. It is the decision that keeps you here.
Australian Cancer Resources