CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER | article
Time to Heal: An Exhibition Portraying Healthcare Workers in Madrid
The work of Emilia Brandão is a tribute to the healthcare community, which today receives the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord 2020.
By Arantxa Neyra
October 16, 2020
Until March 2020, Brazilian Emilia Brandão photographed football players, actors, and musicians for various lifestyle publications across Europe and South America. But that “lifestyle” changed all of us (Europe, South America, and the rest of the planet) overnight, and it prompted her, “who had never had that journalistic side,” to embark on a direction she had never taken.
She had recently settled with her family in Madrid, an old and beloved city where she had lived years before and considers her second home. However, this time, the Madrid that welcomed her was not the one she had fallen in love with—noisy, chaotic, lively, and sometimes frustrating—but a very different city. It was one shut tight, threatened and powerless, sad and scared, living 24 hours with goosebumps and a heavy heart.
That lethargic city and such a unique, historic moment led her to a “process of deep introspection,” “awaking a side that had been asleep,” realizing that “we are all interconnected with our actions” and beginning a search to discover what “the virus wanted to teach us.”
“I felt the urge to do something for others, and since the only thing I know how to do is portraits, I wanted to applaud and value everything the healthcare personnel were doing for us,” Brandão explains.
From ambulance drivers to pulmonologists, from orderlies to surgeons, from ICU cleaners to the doctor interviewed on television, everyone was invited over four days between April and May, when the pandemic in Spain was at its peak, to three major hospitals in Madrid (Puerta del Hierro University Hospital, Gregorio Marañón Hospital, and Southeast University Hospital) during their scarce moments of rest between their long shifts to sit in front of her camera.
Some broke down, others collapsed, some were left speechless, or shared with Emilia something they had not dared to tell anyone else.
**Time to Heal** is the result of a selection of that work: 150 stories, 150 people who fought on the front lines against the virus, who passed, one by one, through an improvised studio to be photographed, wrapped not in a superhero cape as we insisted on seeing them, but in a cloak of fear, impotence, and social service: of humanity.
Pain, frustration, exhaustion, sleeplessness, despair… all translated into swollen dark circles, neglected gray hairs, lost gazes, or tears, which have been captured in these beautiful and powerful black-and-white images, witnesses to a time we wish to forget and a labor we will never forget as a tribute to that entire healthcare community, which today receives the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord 2020 in Oviedo.
Paradoxically, as the mother of two young children and a husband with asthma, at a time when less was known about how the virus was transmitted, Emilia felt that “something” was protecting her: “I was working in favor of the virus; I knew it was a duty, and that’s why I felt calm.”
As she walks past the collection that composes the narrative and recalls each of the moments she captured, Emilia cannot control her emotions, nor can José Félix Hoyo, president of Doctors of the World, an NGO actively involved in supporting Spanish hospitals during the pandemic, nor Dr. Jesús Millán, head of Internal Medicine at Gregorio Marañón Hospital in Madrid (and one of those portrayed), who were present at the exhibition’s presentation at the Leica Gallery in Madrid, where it will be on display until November 12.
**Time to Heal** will likely continue traveling to other uncertain destinations, just like all of us. In the meantime, Emilia continues camera in hand, ready to stay committed to the project, “shooting” wherever it’s needed.