About the Artist
The way he tells it—the way his parents told him—John B. Buse spent his earliest years in a bassinet tucked in the corner of a science laboratory. “Nestled in some low-level radioactivity,” he jokes. Both of his parents were endocrinologists, and while he initially thought he would pursue oncology, Buse ultimately decided to follow in his parents’ footsteps. He is currently director of the Diabetes Care Center at the University of Chapel Hill (UNC) in North Carolina and a former president of the American Diabetes Association.
But Buse shares more than his parents’ interest in diabetes. “My father used to take a ton of pictures,” he says. “He’d shoot a whole roll in two hours—snapshots of me and the family, snapshots of ordinary people doing ordinary things—then develop two copies of every picture. I don’t know if that imprinted on me in some way.”
Buse married his wife, Mary Beth Cassely, 10 years ago. Currently the director of the Innovation Program team at UNC, she also grew up immersed in photography. “My father worked for Polaroid, and he would bring home packs and packs of film they were unable to sell,” she says. “So I have one million pictures from childhood, from college.”
As adults, Buse and Cassely spend weekends at their house in Merry Hill, NC, on the Albemarle Sound near the mouth of the Chowan River. They both dabble in photography during their free time, so much so that it is something of a mystery who actually took the photo featured on this month’s cover of Diabetes Care.
On the Cover: Bald Cypress Tree at Aglet’s End
Together, they have taken thousands of photos of the lone tree outside their home, each of them fascinated for different reasons. “I take early morning walks. The sunrises are beautiful, but they’re even more beautiful when there’s an object adding context within the frame,” Cassely says. “A tree in the middle of the water, for now, still alive.”
For Buse, meanwhile, trees are his primary subject. On safari a few years ago, Cassely and the other visitors trained their cameras on the lions, the zebras, the elephants. Buse, instead, was more intrigued by the flora.
Photography, for Buse, functions as a way to focus on the present during his downtime. But even with a camera in his hands, he is still driven by the same kind of biological curiosity that drew him to medicine.
“Every tree is different. And every tree is different by season,” he says. “I am fascinated by how trees, in winter, look like circulatory patterns or the nervous system. Then when the leaves return, they look more like an image of the body as a whole.
“I’ve taken a thousand pictures of that tree, and I’ll probably take a thousand more,” he adds. “It’s an amazing thing. That you can look over and over again at a tree—and not just that tree, but many trees—and it still looks new.”
