Visura Highlight: 36 Freelance Storytellers

About a year ago I went to Amarillo, Texas for the Washington Post to meet this young couple. Quincy & Staja had lost their 5 year old, Tagan, to Covid a few months prior, and the US was just reaching 500,000 deaths due to the virus. The parents were still so raw from the loss but dedicated to commemorating Tagan through this article. We've been in touch a few times since last year--Quincy likes to make poems from landscape photos, which I send him from New Mexico sometimes, and Staja just likes to hear that someone is remembering her daughter. I still think about them and am so grateful to have had the chance to make these photos with them.

Thanks to Visura and Laura Oliverio for highlighting this story in their feature of 36 freelancers worldwide. I'm in such good company: @donnaferrato @mhammed_kilito @josealvarado @gray_sanmartin - you can see their great work in the Visura article.

Covid Vaccines on the Navajo Nation in NYT & WSJ

The photographs I made for a Bloomberg feature on covid-19 vaccinations in the United States, were also used in articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

The Washington Post: Covid's Youngest Victims

Earlier this month I went to Amarillo, Texas to meet Quincy Drone and Lastassija White. In the Fall of 2020 their five year-old, Tagan, started in-person kindergarten, and in October, she fell sick. When her mother brought her to the hospital, Tagan tested positive for Covid-19 and was sent home. Later that night, she died.

Quincy and Lastassija found it too painful to return home where Tagan spent her last days. These photographs show who and what Tagan left behind--young parents, bereft, a few of her favorite stuffed animals, a colorful hair-bow collection.

“Look what happened to us,” Drone said. “People have to take it serious. And it’s not over. We’re still in the pandemic. We’re still in 2021. Do you think no more kids are going to die? Tagan was the light for us. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

Read the article / View photos on my site

"As the nation reaches the milestone of a half-million deaths about a year after the first American succumbed to the coronavirus, the number of children killed by the disease remains relatively small… Each death represents a shattered family and a trauma deepened, parents say, by the rampant belief that kids can’t get covid, or that it doesn’t much harm them when they do… The children who have died of covid-19 are, even more than among adults, disproportionately children of color — about three-quarters of those who’ve succumbed to covid so far, according to CDC data." -italicized text by Washington Post authors