VIRAL PHOTOGRAPHY

The book we're starting with in our column is not available for purchase but has both human and photographic significance. It contains testimonies from inside a hospital during the Covid pandemic.

The photos are affected by the silent attention in which all the operators, doctors and nurses, act, their faces protected from the contagion by the plastic caps. As in a classic black-and-white photojournalistic service, Bruno Lavi and Eli Atias wanted to make portraits of the hospital he entered to bear witness to the fight against the Sars 19 Covid epidemic. The image is perfect for blocking a gesture of value, such as the healer's hands raising those of the sick, and fixing the intersecting gazes, which question and reassure, in the mix of feelings caused by the unexpected scourge that has hit society modern people, who perhaps thought they were immune. The photographers have also passed this threshold of fallacious credulity, after that of suffering and compassion. However, in the photos, some without human presence, we can see the range of scientific and medical instruments available, an important sign of how humanity also knows how to defend itself with all the means available: breathing apparatus, custom-made beds, surgical clothing.

B.H

The first two photographs in Lavi's and Atias’s book are taken through the glass partition of the hospital room and in front of the mirror, a woman preparing her hair, a serious face, perhaps we can guess the relief of someone who is not sick. The hospital building is explored along the corridors, in the waiting rooms, the switchboard, the laboratory, the infirmary and the bar market where one can take a break. Few images show the exteriors because it is evident that the greatest attention is paid to the interior, even to the inner concern. However, there are no tragic moments, because in the emergency, Lavi and Atias tell us again, modesty was preserved. Evil is omnipresent as it must be in this emergency department, but it is kept at bay, the operators, these species of robots as they are decked out in an emergency, are calm and calm, denoting the indispensable safety even in danger.
There is a general feeling, from the hundred pages of Lavi's and Atias’s book, of a special moment faced with special care, yes, but also with the generous response of the heart as well as the intelligence. A double-page photo concludes the book, the operator stares at the reader to communicate a message, the background is black, the patient's bed is empty, but the eyes that look at us go beyond, because everything, so immortalized by Lavi and Atias, is destined to settle in the annals of our existence on this extraordinary, changing Planet.