We're pleased to share that a recent publication from the UC Medical Humanities Press Book Series features an essay by Ryan Christopher Jones, a current Harvard Anthropology PhD student.
Jones's essay, titled "On Witnessing: Photojournalism and Visualized Trauma Photographs from the sacrament of last rites in Boston hospitals, Spring 2020," delves into early COVID coverage and the moral wrangling that comes with the witnessing of suffering for public audiences.
Jones shares:
This essay recounts my experience of documenting Covid’s initial outbreak as a photojournalist. What is the moral responsibility in using a camera to witness, document and circulate traumatic events as news? Through the lens of ‘witnessing’ I consider what it means to be present amidst suffering through the experience of both seeing and being seen. Here I primarily focus on visual coverage I did for The New York Times in April 2020 that documented a team of Boston-area priests administering the Catholic sacrament of ’the last rites’ to hospital patients dying of Covid-19. A heavy assignment, no doubt, but one that shaped and pushed my own ethical contours in this career as a photojournalist.
This essay is among 45 voices that explore "questions of triage, conflicting patient and family needs, personal mental and physical health struggles, and bioethical and societal questions about how to live, and assist others, in a world-altering pandemic" through essays, poetry, and photographs from frontline healthcare workers, medical educators, healthcare administrators, journalists, anthropologists, historians, ethicists, and more. The book, Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities, provides a multi-layered look into the many ways the COVID-19 pandemic affected the lives and collective wellbeing of healthcare workers and medical humanities experts.