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About the Project
Across Spaulding, staff bravely responded to the pandemic by often working in new roles and with evolving protocols. Simon Zohar, Clinical Supervisor at Spaulding Outpatient Center Cambridge, traveled across the Spaulding network to capture portraits of our staff in this moment in time.
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About the Artist: Simon Zohar, PT, Clinical Supervisor, Spaulding Outpatient Center Cambridge
These are my people. My giant healthcare family. They are photographs of some of the most genuine, brave, and altruistic people I know. Many of whom I've only recently come to know. We are a group of individuals all working together ultimately to help someone else - our patients. How amazing is that? Where else do you find such a unifying positive mission?
When the COVID crisis began, like many other moments in life, I had my camera with me. I'm a physical therapist by trade, photographer by retiree daydream.
As the masks came on and life started to change, I began to take photographs of my coworkers. Someone had to capture this moment. Not the big moment going on in the world, the one happening in our smaller world, Spaulding Rehab Network. The story of a group of people coming together from different places, different backgrounds, learning new roles, taking on unprecedented challenges and re-inventing ourselves in the process.
Through it we learned how to keep each other safe, how to communicate through a mask, to read each other's body language, and more importantly, each other's eyes. We’ve learned to pay more attention to when our coworkers looked anxious, happy, sad, or just plain exhausted. Although we were physically more distant, we'd also been driven closer together at the same time in every other capacity.
Photo after photo, it has been easy to see how incredible every person that works here truly is. I am grateful to have been able to take the portraits of so many during this time. I hope this proves not just to be a memory of hardship, but also one of unity and resilience. That it makes us remember a time when we rose to a challenge and remember all the dedicated people who were there beside us. To me, the photographs evoke a time when we worked to strengthen our patients, our community, and each other.