Three years after the first deaths from Covid-19, Reuters looked at the effects on those left behind. I wanted to understand the scale of grief in our country and the challenges facing those who lost loved ones during the pandemic.
My role
I was assigned to come up with a story for the third anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic. I researched, reported, wrote, illustrated and produced this story. Keep reading to see how I made the cyanotype print graphics.
When I found research estimating how many people will experience the death of a close relative to Covid, the visual of a family tree came to mind. But how do you communicate that feeling of loss and absence when a person dies? Maybe with color? Light and shadow?
I decided on flowers, a more humanizing visual. We give flowers as congratulations and as condolence. They too take part in the cycle of life. Displaying flowers as cyanotype prints conveyed the feeling of “absence” I was striving for – a mark left by something no longer here.
Cyanotype is a photographic medium. As a kid, I’d wander around my neighborhood gathering flowers to place atop this light-sensitive paper that, when exposed to the sun , creates beautiful blue impressions. I followed the same process in this project.
At first the prints turned out, well, bad. I learned that by pressing and drying the flowers, I was able to get a sharper edge.
I experimented with leaving the prints in the sun for varying amounts of time. Underexposed prints left large white blotches on the paper, while overexposing made the object barely perceptible. As winter came, I propped up the exposures to avoid the stretching shadow from the sun hanging lower in the sky.
The image is processed by submerging the paper in water after it’s been exposed to the sun. As the paper dries, it turns a darker and darker blue. To me, the blue portrays a melancholy feeling that fit with the pandemic challenges I was learning about in my research.
Reporting this emotional topic was difficult at times, but working with the flowers and the sun pouring onto my apartment floor was restorative. The physical process gave me time to reflect on the story and its importance.
