Unconventional portraits convey the traumas — and victories — still carried by nurses who treated desperately ill patients at the pandemic’s peak.
With the U.S. slowly emerging from COVID-19, it would be easy to assume that the pandemic will soon be in the past, at least for Americans who didn’t lose a loved one.
But for many, particularly health care workers, the trauma of what they experienced while caring for deathly sick patients will be with them for years to come.
To capture the idea that the past can be part of the present, Los Angeles photographer Jae Hong had a powerful idea. He would focus on nurses who had worked in an Isolation Intensive Care Unit at a Southern California hospital. For more than a year, the nurses had taken care of extremely ill COVID patients and, despite all efforts, had lost many, sometimes in horrific fashion, with collapsed lungs or by suddenly “coding” after making progress. Even though the ward closed this spring, these nurses can’t forget what they endured.
Registered nurse Jill Shwam, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, poses for an in-camera multiple exposure in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., April 6, 2021. A scene replays in Shwam's head each day: an 11-year-old boy screaming while his mother, in her early 40s, doesn’t respond as doctors try to save her. “You need to say goodbye,” Shwam remembers saying as the woman's oxygen levels dropped sharply. The woman told her son: “I hope this isn’t the last time I talk to you. I have to go.”
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Registered nurse Verlin Frazier, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, poses for an in-camera multiple exposure in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., April 6, 2021. Frazier still remembers watching a woman walk between beds to reach — and say goodbye to — her husband. “I remember biting my tongue and cheek, holding my breath, anything to prevent myself from bursting into tears,” says Frazier.
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Registered nurse Nikki Grecco, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, poses for an in-camera multiple exposure in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., April 6, 2021. Grecco vividly remembers the first death in the COVID ward and how he died. “I have never felt so defeated as I did in that moment,” Grecco says.
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Registered nurse Elisa Castorena, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, poses for an in-camera multiple exposure in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., April 6, 2021. Castorena remembers many patients who died, but she prefers to focus on happy memories such as working with other nurses to bathe bed-ridden patients while listening to music and joking with them.
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Registered nurse Debbie Wooters, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, holds a group picture taken with her fellow nurses, in an in-camera multiple exposure made in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., April 6, 2021. Many patients were frightened when told they would be put on a ventilator. Wooters remembers a patient who “looked at me and said, through his gasping breath, ‘I don’t want to die.’”
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Registered nurse Lisa Lampkin, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, poses for an in-camera multiple exposure in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., April 6, 2021. “I would go home, try to sleep,” she says. Then she would “wake up to the reality of this pandemic again.”
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Registered nurse Christina Anderson, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, poses for an in-camera multiple exposure in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., April 6, 2021. During brutal days at the hospital, Anderson and other nurses would scream or cry together, knowing that at home it would be hard for their families to understand what they were going through. Anderson's 12-year-old would ask: “Mommy, how many lives did you save today?” Or: “Mommy, how many people died today?”
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Registered nurse Anthony Wilkinson, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, poses for an in-camera multiple exposure in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., April 6, 2021. Wilkinson still thinks about those 30 hours — the ones when three patients died. “You try to keep somebody alive, but their body is decomposing,” says Wilkinson.
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Registered nurse Jamie Corcoran, part of a group of nurses who had been treating coronavirus patients in an intensive care unit, poses for an in-camera multiple exposure in the empty COVID-19 ICU at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., April 6, 2021. As an ICU nurse the last five years, Corcoran got used to seeing death. She dealt with it by remaining detached. With COVID-19, detachment wasn’t possible.
AP Photo / Jae C. Hong
Hong’s approach called for a photo technique not typically used in reporting the news: First he made portraits of 10 of the nurses in the hospital. He then asked each to step out of the frame so he could make pictures of the background. Finally, he merged the photos with a multiple exposure function in the camera. The result: haunting images that show nurses both in the photo, the present, and seemingly somewhere else in the past.
Hong’s concept generated enthusiasm and drew in several colleagues, all eager to help accomplish his vision.
West regional news director Peter Prengaman interviewed all 10 nurses, hospital administrators and one of the ward doctors, writing the nurses’ poignant stories — and traumatic experiences — in vignette form. Digital storytelling photo editor Alyssa Goodman and West deputy Steph Mullen worked closely with Hong on the edit, and Goodman built the presentation. Finally, Ted Anthony, director of digital innovation, edited the text story, giving extra attention to how the photo process was described.
The piece was used widely in the U.S. and beyond, including by Yahoo, MSN, ABC News, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald and the Independent. Shared widely on social media, AP colleague Aya Batrawy tweeted out the piece with words that summed up what Hong and the team hoped to accomplish: “This is journalism at its best, AP at its strongest.”
For arresting, interpretive photography that evokes the lingering impact of the pandemic on these front-line medical workers, Hong earns this week’s Best of the States award.
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