There were some dramatic images that came out of the battle over the coronavirus around the world and on the outside. However, if a doctor is the photographer himself, there is a greater level of intimacy because he understands what the caregivers and patients are going through.
Dr. Scott Kobner is the lead ER resident at USC Medical Center in Los Angeles County, one of the nation’s largest public health systems.
‘Every day I had, or sometimes after shifts, I stuck to the kind of work I was doing to really try to play a very different role, one that had nothing to do with the medical care offered. , but in a position where I could use my knowledge and experience to help others see the world through my own experience, ‘says dr. Kobner to NPR.
NPR’s Rachel Martin interviewed Kobner about his photography for Morning issue. You can listen to the ten-minute conversation here:
Dr. Kobner is an amateur photographer, and when the pandemic struck, he started using his Leica M6 and M10 cameras to record the situation in the ER. These photos were published by the Los Angeles Times this week. When one thinks of Leica, historical images of wars, pandemics and other tragedies come to mind. The coronavirus is indeed the greatest tragedy of today that still refuses to go away quietly.
Photography is not my day job. It’s not really my night job either. My day-night job is medicine for emergencies. Being an emergency physician will always be my first love. But photography is a short head. The more you know about both, the more similar they become … Photography is the mindset of recognizing and retaining the fleeting. The rest is just chemistry. – From Kobner’s website.
The photos are all in black and white and have a cruel, tight look of a life and death struggle that actually captures them. It may be gloomy scenes set in a different place for viewers, but for Dr. Kobner, this is the reality he is recording.
“It’s a sacred honor to be with people during their most vulnerable, especially their last moments on earth,” Dr Kobner wrote on his Instagram.
Dr. Kobner does not want his photography to distract him in any way from his life-saving duties in the hospital and therefore only takes photos on his days off. He also makes it clear to the patients that he is not involved in their care when he takes photos. Although the hospital allowed him to photograph the surgeries, he also made sure that each patient got permission for it.
Dr. Kobner grew up in Flemington, New Jersey, and studied at the New York University School of Medicine. Last spring, when he saw that the pandemic was taking over his home state of New York completely, he knew it would not be long before the virus would enter California and cause similar devastation.
The photo that affected him the most is that of his colleague, dr. Molly Grassini, who is trying and hoping a patient will revive. During the early days of the pandemic, a young patient had a cardiac arrest on his way to the hospital. The team desperately tried to revive him, and dr. Grassini looked at the monitor with hopeful eyes, only asking to see a heartbeat or a sign of life.
“I think the best part of photography is that there is an undeniable narrative authority attached to it,” says Dr. Kobner NPR. ‘You know, when you see a photograph, you know that it was a documentation of a snapshot and that it was not a reproduction of something.
‘It was not a drawing or a painting, where, you know, could have been a lot of details – or had to be remembered or changed … And what a lot of the wrong information and fear and conspiracy theory on some level could thrive on medicine, is the absence, I think, of the narrative authority that something like photography can offer. ”
Dr. Kobner wants his photos to show the general public what’s really going on in hospitals as they work 24 hours a day to save lives that are still slipping away.
(via NPR and LA Times)
About the author: Phil Mistry is a photographer and teacher based in Atlanta, GA. He started one of the first digital camera classes in New York City The International Center for Photography in the 90s. He was the director and teacher of the Digital Days Workshops of the magazine Sony / Popular Photography. You can contact him by email here.
Image credits: All photos by dr. Scott Kobner and used with permission.