Jack Slater waits as the backup recipient for a liver transplant at the University of Washington as wife Deborah Swets calls relatives to let them know Jack might be going into surgery.  

For nearly three years, Seattle Times photojournalist Alan Berner chronicled the journey of Jack Slater, a local teacher and former actor who needed a liver transplant when Slater began to lose his battle with hepatitis C. The disease rendered Slater’s liver unable to process proteins and nutrients, which would then create buildup and blockages causing swelling and pain. When Slater received a new liver in 2004, no one suspected that the same disease that destroyed Slater’s first liver would lead to his death less than two years after the transplant. Because of the passion and collaboration between Berner and Slater, Berner’s lens caught every pivotal and painful moment of the journey from the needles and navel scoops to Slater’s funeral last year. Montana Journalism Review recently asked Berner about one of his most difficult assignments.

--Chandra Johnson

 

Montana Journalism Review: How did you first get the assignment to record Slater’s ordeal?

Berner: Jack had written a chronicle for the need for a liver and being unable to work as a teacher anymore at Franklin High School, and I don’t know how it wound up in the managing editor’s hands, who said, ‘This is just terrific. It has potential to be terrific. He’ll write it and we’ll chronicle his journey to get a new liver.’  In the fall of ’03 was the first time I met him.

I got a printout of what he had written and just called him up because I wanted to meet him in person because what I was going to ask him was for total and complete unfettered access. I wanted to know how his wife Deborah was going to feel about it since I was going to be seeing things that he’s not used to having another party see, and that I needed that kind of access or it wouldn’t work.

Of course, I came by, he was on the phone and I started shooting immediately, before I’d even really met him. I thought what the hell? I’ll get him used to it right away. We hit it off immediately.

MJR: Obviously transplant surgery is a gamble, but since Jack didn’t die from complications until more than a year after the transplant, was it a shock when he started to decline?

Berner: The hepatitis C virulently attacked his transplanted liver. He was in the less than five percent who have that kind of a reaction. Within a couple of months after getting the transplant, he was just feeling terrible and they thought they may have injured one of the bile ducts when they were doing the monthly biopsies with this huge needle. God, Jack would never look at the needle, but you couldn’t believe this procedure.

But it turned out it wasn’t any of those things; it was just his body was rejecting the new liver. We never expected it to take the turn it did. But I always thought he was going to make it, I really did. I always thought he would bounce back.

 
       
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Alan Berner, a native of St. Louis, has degrees in philosophy and photojournalism from the University of Missouri. The National Press Photographers Association has named him the Regional Press Photographer of the Year five times. He is the 1995 recipient of the Nikon/NPPA Documentary Sabbatical grant for his project on the New American West. He has received the Cowles Cup, the Associated Press Sweepstakes Award for Oregon and Washington, four times.He's been staff photographer at The Seattle Times for more than two decades.