Defying the Myth: How We Value Lives

For over a decade, award winning photographer Carol Allen-Storey photographed three mothers, Annalisa, Nicola and Shoulana — each raising a child with a lifelong disability. She was there for the hospital corridors and the kitchen tables, the birthdays and the emergencies. The result is Defying the Myth: not a project about disability, but a story in collaboration with the families, told from the inside.

Over time, the work grew beyond photography into a shared act of storytelling — drawings, poetry and testimony woven together with the images, all in the families' own words. As Clarissa Ward writes in her foreword, these children deserve to be seen "not as burdens. Not as tragedies. Not as the recipients of our pity or our inspiration — but as themselves.”

Join Shoulana, Annalisa and Nicola with Carol for a candid conversation on how we see and value disability, who carries the weight of care,…