‘What I was interested in doing was preserving their humanity

There were many times while Eric Blau was writing his book, “Common Heroes,” that he wanted to quit. He found that interviewing and photographing terminally ill people was a highly emotional experience, even for him, a physician accustomed to dealing with sickness and death. But the 42-year-old Kaiser Permanente internist persevered, and, after three years and hundreds of interviews conducted in snatches of his spare time, Blau produced a candid view of the lives of 35 ordinary people dealing with the pain of disease and the likelihood of an early death. Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed Blau in his La Jolla home, and Sean M. Haffey photographed him.

I grew up the son of a professional photographer and our darkroom was as big as our living room. I’ve been doing photography as long as I remember, but I didn’t start doing it seriously until I got out of my medical training 10 years ago.

I think to be a “success” in photography you have to do something original. Most importantly, you should do something that interests you or that you can do in a more interesting or unique way. For example, photographing terminally ill people, at least at the time I started, before the AIDS stuff, had not really been done before.

I think it began with my aunt. She had cancer in the late ‘70s. I come from a very verbal family that is always yacking at one another. And what happened was, when my aunt got sick, suddenly everyone started protecting my grandfather. He knew something was wrong, and he couldn’t talk to anybody in the family and they couldn’t talk to him, and there were sort of the whispers and all the white lies that go with that.

I realized, “Here’s a family that’s pretty together. They’re fairly well educated, and yet they can’t talk together. What goes on with my own patients?”

I started talking to people, and it just seemed to me the problem was not with the patients. The problem was with all the stereotypes that go with society’s attempts to be proper . . . it’s not the dying person who’s upset about talking about it. That’s what they want to talk about, and oftentimes the very people who should be talking to them aren’t.

At the very beginning of the project I made very dramatic, emotional photographs of people looking sick. It soon became clear that that wasn’t what I was really interested in. What I was interested in doing was preserving their humanity, showing that, even though they have this illness, they’re not cut off from society. I wanted to include them with all of us who are supposedly healthy.

I interviewed a lot of older people at first, and, as I became more comfortable, I started interviewing people who were more my age, people between 20 and 40, people who appeared healthy. Sometimes, a couple of people died the next day, but they’re still in the book. My guess is you couldn’t tell that they were going to be dead the next day.

Sometimes I’d have a good interview that was really interesting, and I’d be so jazzed I just wanted to run and do five more interviews.

Other times, I’d get somebody who was really devastated, like Rhonda Gelbman, the woman who was told by doctors she was going to be fine, so she went out and got married and had two kids. When I interviewed her, the kids were sort of crawling all over her while she was clearly ill. Stories like hers made me think, “I don’t know if I can go on doing this.” So I wouldn’t interview anybody for a few weeks.

Being a physician made it a little easier. It wasn’t like these people were afraid I was going to exploit them. Oftentimes I’d be the first person sitting down with them, open-ended, with the tape recorder going, and just let them talk. The most amazing things would happen.