Staff nurse Paul Taylor approaching the end of a long shift in PPE
Olympus OMD EM5 Mk3, 25mm f1.2 PRO lens, 1/250s @f2.0, ISO 1000
1st September, 2020
It already seems that it was in another lifetime but only a few brief months ago the NHS was bracing itself for the impact of a novel coronavirus, unknown until December 2019, that threatened to overwhelm its services and in particular its intensive care units (ICUs). Having spent much of my medical career working in ICU I have always wanted to photograph the daily life of this previously little known and poorly understood speciality but there were always other things to do. However as the full reality of the impact of COVID-19 began to dawn it was obvious that what was happening was of such historical significance that it needed to be recorded. With a ban on all visitors, including the press, to our hospital I found myself picking up my camera and beginning to document the impact of the pandemic on the lives of my colleagues and the patients we were caring for at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, Wales. The resultant images are some the most powerful that I have ever taken.
I was very fortunate that Olympus UK generously supported the project and loaned me an OMD EM5 Mk3 camera as well as the stellar 25mm f1.2 PRO lens and tiny but nevertheless superb 45mm f1.8 lens. This enabled me to keep a "dirty" camera in the red zone on ICU where full personal protective equipment (PPE) had to be worn at all times. As a result of the pandemic intensive care has received a level of media coverage unknown during its short history and we have grown familiar with pictures of staff in PPE caring for patients on ventilators. The photographs that I took during the unimaginably busy months in the Spring of 2020 are different though. I was not a journalist parachuted into a hospital for a few days with little understanding of what was going on around them. My photographs, taken at the ends of shifts or on my days off offer a unique perspective on what it was like to work in intensive care throughout the first wave. Within the constraints of my work I tried to capture the experience of not only the doctors and nurses, but also the people in the background, the unknown and the unrecognised, whose stories are rarely heard, who frequently get paid very little but without whom the whole system would come crashing down.
Over the coming weeks I shall be posting some of the photographs that I have taken during the pandemic and telling the stories behind them.
© Nick Mason. All rights reserved.