When you take a picture of your wife, son, or daughter, free of disease and unhappiness, they are always going to be that age in the photo. It’s the perfect way of stopping time.

— Joel Sartore,

“Photographing Your Family”

They met at the Zoo Bar in college. Her hair was long and blond, and she laughed at everything he said.

“I was head over heels,” Kathy Sartore says. “Immediately.”

“It was like you’d been hit by lightning,” Joel Sartore says, teasing.

He’s one of the top photographers in the world, a shooter for National Geographic. She’s his wife of 24 years, a photogenic muse, a mother. She and the kids are all over his most recent book, “Photographing Your Family (and all the kids and friends and animals who wander through too).”

You want to shoot real moments, he writes.

Joel’s motto: If they are laughing, shoot it. If they are crying, shoot that, too.

But a few years ago, for the first time in their marriage, Joel didn’t shoot many photos of Kathy.

Some moments are too dark. Some moments, you really don’t want to freeze in time.

One night, in 2002 or 2003, he snaps Kathy standing before the bathroom mirror. The light is low. Her body is bare. Her eyes look haunted.

This photo wasn’t a real moment, Joel explains, just something he shot as a “stock” photo, in case some publication would want to buy it.

“I shot it with breast cancer in mind.”

Kathy was the picture of health, then.

Joel’s book is open on the dining room table of their antiques-filled home off Sheridan Boulevard.

That’s Kathy, on page 81, cutting Cole’s hair.

That’s Kathy, on page 25, laughing as she lies on the carpet with Ellen, their faces together.

That’s Kathy, on page 52, up close. So close you can see grass and sky reflected in her eyes.

Kathy doesn’t know why they’re still in love. They’re so different. She likes to sleep in, take life slow. He’s always at full-speed.

Will you put that damn camera down?

He traveled the world, obsessed like that, on assignment for National Geographic.

That’s Joel and his gear, on page 174, sitting precariously on planks high above the jungle floor.

He used to come home a stranger to the kids and their routines. But his focus changed the day before Thanksgiving in 2005.

She’d gone in for a mammogram. She remembers the radiologist staring too long at the ultrasound image of her right breast.

What’s it look like?

It looks like cancer.

That’s Kathy, on page 104, in bed in the middle of the day, eyes closed, lips pale, stocking cap covering her balding head.

When Kathy was sick, I barely shot. We agreed that we should have a picture or two because it was the biggest thing that had happened to us in the twenty or so years we had been married.

She remembers how she went to the car after the diagnosis, dazed, and how Joel stayed and asked the doctor questions, in his obsessed way, and then came to her.

You will beat this, he said.

He made her believe it, too.

Some people are better than others at finding the best light. Joel sees it. With him, she says, everything seems possible.

Joel stayed home while Kathy was sick. To keep busy and make money, he wrote “Photographing Your Family.”

One day, when Kathy was getting chemo, he engineered a way to get one of the family dogs to smile for the camera. A big toothy smile.

I used fishing line. It’s a fine monofilament line you can’t see. I’d lift the line with my left hand, snap the picture, and lower the line that’s lifting his lips.

That photo, of their pound dog Prairie, is on the book’s cover.

Prairie died of lung cancer. They have a new dog, Baxter, and he’s chewing on a table in the foyer now. Joel gets up and shoos him away.

Kathy is cancer-free. Her hair has grown back. She’s says being ill has made her see the world in a different light.

She used to be scared to fly. She used to drive around town and not think about the other people in the other cars. But now, she says, she looks around with an empathy she didn’t have before, knowing that everybody struggles at times.

She’s in each moment now.

It’s made Joel see the world in a different light, too.

When a major event happens in the family, you want to make sure you’re there for it.

Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.