FINDING MEANING IN PANDEMIC

As we approach the end of a year that has shaken us, it’s clear that our ideas of what was once “normal” have shifted. Nine months ago, when the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Ethiopia, photographer Yonas Tadesse began documenting the doctors, patients, and emergency workers at Eka Kotebe hospital in Addis Ababa. Finding Meaning in a Pandemic is a thoughtful look at the individuals whose lives have been altered by COVID-19. While making this work, Tadesse contracted COVID-19 himself.

These images, alongside an essay by award-winning novelist Maaza Mengiste, offer insight to a year of grieving and reckoning, and call into question: Who are we? How do we respond to difficult situations in life? How do we define life, time, family, friends, and healing?

In order to provide as much context to this story as possible, key photographs in this feature are interactive by using Four Corners, an open source platform created by Fred Ritchin to give images more credibility. Roll over the corners of the selected images to learn more about the photographer, backstory, related imagery, and other links.

How do we account for all that we have lost this year?

by Maaza Mengiste 

2020 – propelled by COVID-19 and ongoing police violence -- has been a time of reckoning as much as grieving. Those two emotions, complicated by decades and centuries of discrimination and oppression, have merged to push people into the streets. The protests that erupted when George Floyd was murdered by police in the United States sparked a global fire that had been waiting all along to burst forth. I have looked at those photographs that have emerged from the confrontations between police and protesters around the world. What I see: the defiance and the aggressive pushback, the hopelessness and the tears, the anger and frustration - all of it backlit by bonfires, by flashlights, by headlights. The photographs have been a stunning glance into an uncertain future. No matter where each of you might call home, we are all caught in the upheaval, spinning through the unending chaos. It has left me shaken and I cannot help wondering how we are to care for each other now. 

This year has not offered us many mercies: COVID-19 compounded the dangers of the protests. The end of lockdown released the pent-up rage. The spread of the virus has emphasized our societal divisions. It has exposed institutional injustices in the bluntest of terms. It has reminded us of our human frailties. We have seen ourselves for what we are, and the reflection back has been frightening. It seems almost daily, someone asks, Is this what we’ve become? And yet others have remarked, This is what we always were. Yonas Tadesse’s photographs, set in Eka Kotebe hospital in Addis Ababa and featuring doctors and patients who are battling the virus, exist in the space between those two questions, between shock and resignation. The portraits, dignified and compassionate, offer a tremor of light in this dark moment in history. (continued below)

It would be too easy to think of Yonas’s photos as simply elegiac - as grief captured, then frozen, by the camera. These portraits are far from lamentations for the dead, or for loss. Sensitively rendered, his subjects stand before him resolute and dignified, both vulnerable and unshaken. They are janitors and doctors, patients, sanitation workers and morticians. Many appear in PPE. Some look to the side or directly at the camera, their masks lowered to reveal their faces, their eyes blazing in a dim room. They give their names and, in the details that they share, they offer a glimpse of the world outside the hospital, beyond the virus. Who are we, when we are called to do what might be the most dangerous work of our lives? Who do we become in those isolated moments when we are surrounded by the dying and the hopeless? When only a sheer veil of uncertainty separates us from that thing that might harm us, too? 

Yonas lived in Eka Kotebe hospital in order develop this project. He set up his studio on the 3rd floor, and he listened to the stories that doctors, patients, and hospital staff told him. His camera became only one tool in relating their experiences. He also had his profound empathy and openness, his willingness to familiarize himself with the chaos and their fear by living it, too. This stunning gesture of generosity and immersive artistry lend these portraits their intense beauty and power. He was not making photographs of people in a hospital, he was telling the stories of those in his own community. Putting himself in danger in the process.

While completing this project, Yonas caught coronavirus. When he contacted me, he had just undergone the third test to confirm that he was now negative. “COVID-19 introduced me to heroes,” he states. “I realized for the first time that we live among them.” Those same doctors who were his subjects in front of the lens were the ones who saved his life. Yonas goes on to say that in the months he spent at the hospital, he “saw heroes in the dying, the survivors, and the healthcare workers.” But what was laid bare when he found himself infected with the virus? What emerged from his realization of his own mortality? “I fell in love with life,” he says. But he goes on: “Is my life more precious than that of the others who have died? What would I do differently if I survived it?” He does not answer this directly. He doesn’t need to: these photographs as a testimony of his response.