DPOTY 2021 - RPS Member Category Winner
RPS Member Category Winner David Collyer All in a Day’s Work As a documentary photographer, when Covid-19 first came on to the radar in the UK, I knew that in some way I wanted to record the imprint it was bound to leave on society. Simultaneously, as a healthcare professional working as an Anaesthetic Practitioner, in a hospital in South Wales, I was well placed to see at first hand the effects that the unfolding pandemic was having not just on patients, but on the staff, my colleagues, and also on myself. There was a rhetoric during the first wave of the pandemic that many healthcare professionals were uncomfortable with, and one that we felt was being used by politicians who may not actually have the best interests of the NHS or its staff at heart, and that was the pushing of the image of “NHS Heroes”. This sat very uneasily with me. From my perspective, we went to work and did the job we were paid for, and this was a view shared by many. It would have been easy to photograph patients, but I felt this was to an extent voyeuristic, but I was lucky that I was one of very few photographers given access to clinical areas so early in the crisis. I decided to effectively turn the camera vicariously back on myself, using my tight knit group of colleagues, to show a human face, and not the eulogised heroes of popular parlance. I wanted to capture light hearted moments as well as the exhaustion, but also to portray a sense of claustrophobia that we were feeling from the restrictions of the PPE. The title, ‘All in a Day’s Work’, was designed to show that for us that’s exactly what it was. I shot the project entirely on film, and because I needed to maintain my clinical duties as well as being a photographer, I shot with a basic point and shoot that I could use discreetly, and keep clean. I was very fortunate that the work received international media coverage, including a national newspaper front page, and was published as a book. My ultimate aim was to record a snapshot of a time that few will forget. davidcollyerphotography.com
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