The PPE Portrait Project

This chapter focuses on the intersection of photography and the human body, with a critique of, and reimagining of, the history of medical imaging. The novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020 thrust millions of patients across the world into hospitalized conditions where masked and gowned clinicians wearing disorienting PPE made it difficult to identify and connect with their providers. The recent epidemics and pandemic and the related need for PPE upended one of the fundamental bases of ethical behavior, the face-to-face encounter. The PPE Portrait Project is based on the knowledge of how social gestures can affect people’s bodies and that positive social gestures can activate a person’s healing mechanisms and have beneficial physiological effects. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, xtine burrough and Judy Walgren.