© jmse
In May 1990, Tracy, a
condemned to death child, was born in New York, prematurely suffering from the
AIDS Virus, and her mother left the hospital after giving birth, abandoning the
baby for ever.
Because of the highly
complex medical problems derived from the disease, Tracy remained in a hospital
until she was eight months old, when she was transferred to the Incarnation
Children´s Center for Children with AIDS.
A TURNING POINT IN A
PHOTOGRAPHIC CAREER
From scratch, the
photographic coverage of Tracy´s evolution since her arrival to the New York
Incarnation Children´s Center for Children with AIDS in November 1990, became a
significant challenge for Claire Yaffa
in every conceivable respect and put her through her paces in many different
sides.
She had already acquired
great experience photographing needed people, specially neglected, abused,
forgotten and abandoned children during the fulfillment of her first project as
a concerned photographer, taking pictures between 1979 and 1987 inside the New
York Foundling Hospital and its Crisis Nursery and the constant struggle of its
staff to fight against the psychological and physical damages that can last a
lifetime, and whose frustration often results in future crime and violence if
society doesn´t bear them in mind.
And she had proved to
excel at what would be a constant throughout her professional career: a
remarkable ability to get an exceedingly difficult to attain level of intimacy,
trust and approach with both the young patients and their fathers, mothers or
other relatives.
It all had resulted in her
picture book Reaching Out, published in 1987.
She had also made a lot of
portraits of a number of worldwide acclaimed photographers and had been
extensively working for The New York Times and Associated Press as a
photojournalist.
© Claire Yaffa
But Tracy: A Dying Child
is Born would be arguably the most important photographic work in her life and
the most intimately related with her inner being and essence, in which she´d
prove once more her outstanding gift as a photographer but very specially her
mettle, true human dimension and sensitivity during the last months of life of this so little child, whose gruesome
context was presided over by her total defenseless reality from the second 1 of
her existence:
- Her mother had gone
away.
- His father was
completely unknown and had been impossible to spot.
- There weren´t any other
known relatives and all the efforts made to find them were in vain.
- And above all, the whole
eerie context made the photographer to ask herself two extremely difficult to answer
questions:
How to tackle getting
pictures of such an exceedingly young baby?
© Claire Yaffa
How to face the absolute
certainty that Tracy would die in a short elapse of time as had been stated by
the doctors and nurses?
On the other hand, Tracy
was eight months old when Claire Yaffa began photographing her, so it was
almost impossible to create any empathy with the patient, because there hadn´t
been any mutual contact throughout the previous six months in which the little
baby was in other hospital, and additionally, her extreme youth made that even
her most basical cognitive skills and perceptive abilities weren´t developed
yet.
As if this were not enough,
Tracy was greatly disabled, to such an extent that unlike other babies of her
age,
© Claire Yaffa
she couldn´t hold up her
head, sit up or roll over.
If we add to it the fact
that the little Tracy only weighted seven pounds and two ounces, had almost all
her vital organs damaged, lost stamina by leaps and bounds and suffered from
steady pains all over her body, we can grasp what undertaking this photographic
essay meant.
© Claire Yaffa
An appalling situation
ruled from the very beginning to the end by a lack of hope and an impending
death as two certainties known in advance.
PLUCKING UP COURAGE
Under the circumstances,
top priority for Stephen W. Nicholas (Medical Director at Incarnation
Children´s Center), rest of doctors and nurses and Claire Yaffa was to help
Tracy as much as possible, taking care of her to the utmost and trying to make
up for the absence of her mother.
Because of the seriousness
of Tracy´s disease, she needed constant medical attention 24 hours a day, both
when she was awake and asleep, something to which Claire collaborated as much
as she could.
Diagram showing the configuration of the
rangefinder of a Leica M6 linked to the viewfinder on the left of the camera
and featuring parallax correction for the shortest distances. This is an
optomechanical masterpiece and a very accurate system for quickly focusing
under low or very low ambient light and is made up by more than 150 individual
high-precision parts assembled in a completely artisan way. After using a
Rolleiflex 2.8f K7F Type 1 medium format camera with Carl Zeiss Planar 80 mm
f/2.8 lens and a 35 mm Nikon FM2 with Nikkor 50 mm f/1.8 Ai lens and Md-12
motordirve as main photographic gear until mid eighties, both Cornell Capa and
Eugene Smith (with whom she had a great friendship until their deaths)
recommended Claire Yaffa in 1986 to change to 24 x 36 mm format Leica M
rangefinder cameras, much more adequate for the kind of photojournalistic and
concerned images she wanted to get, in which discretion during the photographic
art was of top paramount significance. And she did it, acquiring two Leica M6
cameras, which paid off in this amazing and exceedingly hard to fulfill image
story, in which the almost inaudible whispering noise yielded by the shutter
release button on being pressed was a key factor not to disturb the little
Tracy, and the lack of a swivelling mirror enabled to often shoot handheld at
very low shutter speeds under dim light, in symbiosis with the tiny, very light
and highly luminous Leica M lenses. This photographic essay would have been
impossible to do with any reflex medium format or 35 mm format camera, whose
shutter noise is much higher and whose mirror movement would have made
unfeasable using shutter speeds roughly under 1/45 s shooting hand and wrist.
©
Leica Camera AG
Regarding the photographic
coverage, it was very important for Claire to do things as silently as possible
and with utmost respect, so she got pictures of Tracy at different hours of the
day with two Leica M6 cameras: one of them coupled to a 7 elements in 5 groups
Summicron-M 35 mm f/2 Third Version (1979-1996) and another one with a 6
elements in 4 groups Summicron-M 50 mm f/2 Version 4 (1979-1994), from every
angle and either inside her little bed or in the arms of nurses, because she
couldn´t barely move.
© Claire Yaffa
The constant view of the
little Tracy intubed, specially when she was conscious, suffering very much,
crying and showing in her countenance the harsh pains she was experiencing, was
something horrible to watch and not easy to endure.
Impotence, rage, pity,
stress and many other things flowed into the mind of the photographer on being
witness of this terrible tragedy for which there wasn´t any cure in 1990 and
1991.
But through great spunk,
work till exhaustion and love, Claire managed to get the pictures, little by
little, toiling to document this exceedingly touching story.
The photographer couldn´t
often sleep throughout the night. She frequently woke up with the image of
Tracy intubed and suffering coming to head once and again, which resulted in
sleep deprivation, progressive increasing fatigue and anguish and above all the
unrestlessness brought about by the certainty that nothing could be done from a
medical viewpoint to save Tracy, who would suffer more and more every day and
would die soon.
In spite of all the many
cares, dedication and love she was receiving, Tracy´s life was being a hell.
The photographer tried to
grin and bear it the best she could, crying privately at some moments and
keeping a steady fight for not showing her feelings and anxiety.
She needed to be brave and
she was brave taking pictures of Tracy during four months, in which the
photographer strove after focusing 100% on her work and getting the best
possible images to tell the story of Tracy, so she decided to forget about
fatigue, lack of sleep, significant increase in hunger, overstress, anxiety, etc.
She had a mission to do, a
work to implement, however bloodcurdling the context could be, and Tracy and
others who could be in her situation in future deserved the effort.
© Claire Yaffa
Therefore, Claire took
constantly her two Leica M6 cameras with her and got pictures of Tracy while
sleeping, being in the arms of nurses, crying, being fed, and also of specific
areas of her fragile and emaciated body during meaningful instants.
The photographer had
already two grown-up sons who were in their twenties, so the helpless and
exceedingly young Tracy became top priority.
And in the same way as
happened with the nurses, Claire also projected a great deal of her maternal
instinct on the little baby to take care of her the best she could.
COMPROMISE AND ATTITUDE AS
A CONCERNED PHOTOGRAPHER
From a photographic
viewpoint, Claire Yaffa took a great level of compromise in this reportage in
which she put her soul giving all of herself, developing such a huge
involvement that she was repeatedly on the brink of exhaustion to be able to
get pictures of Tracy.
© Claire Yaffa
Being steadily at the end
of her tether, the desire to document Tracy´s last months of life and to help
the little baby as much as possible became the driving force that enabled the
photographer to gather the necessary strength to forge ahead this photographic
essay that went far beyond an image project.
In 1991, AIDS disease had
been known for nine years, and it was considered by wide sectors of population,
both in USA and rest of the world, as a kind of Twentieth Century plague comparable
to the Black Death in medieval age, so people suffering from it were usually
excluded from society to greater or lesser degree.
And the lack of
information worsened things even more.
In this regard, Tracy´s
story, because of her extreme youth and familiar abandonement from her very
birth, was specially relevant.
She was exceedingly
vulnerable, not only in terms of the then lethal illness she was suffering, but
in the same way as the rest of people all over the world having it, also from
the viewpoint of the scarce information then available and the rejection this
disease generated in wide sectors of society, who most times preferred to turn
a blind eye, not to speak about it because of fear and go on living a normal
daily life.
The photographer realized
that the risk of oblivion would be big after the certain demise of Tracy which
would happen in a matter of weeks or a few months. It was difficult to foresee,
but doctors and nurses agreed that she would live five or six months more at
the most.
It was necessary to tell
this story, to convey the myriad of experiences and vital lessons stemming from
it, and above all to help to generate a collective social awareness about the
this disease and how to fight against it and help its patients.
This way, mainly through
sweat, strenuous effort and tons of love, Claire managed to create a
comprehensive archive of pictures depicting the seven month life span evolution
of Tracy, from her arrival to the New York Incarnation Children´s Center for
Children with AIDS in January 1991 to her death on June 29th of that year.
OVERCOMING THE EMOTIONAL
ODYSSEY AND INNER UPHEAVAL
In spite of the
successfully accomplished picture story, the photographer´s mind was often
inevitably convulsed, though she managed not to show it.
Desperation and sorrow
flowed innerly galore, as Tracy´s health was increasingly deteriorating with
the elapse of months.
And both horror and
impotence reached their climax during the last two weeks when the little Tracy
was almost utterly crippled and terminally ill.
More than one photograph
was taken with the photographer shedding tears but she fought tooth and nail
and got it.
But there was a sphere in
which things resulted specially difficult to assume: the scope of one´s own
convictions:
How was it possible that
such a little baby could suffer so much?
Which would be the ethical
or rational limit to artificially prolong that context when the terminal
stage of
Tracy´s life came to an end?
On the other hand, should
she stop taking pictures at any moment?
© Claire Yaffa
Inevitably, during Tracy´s
last days alive and experiencing greater and greater pains, the euthanasia
debate came sometimes to the mind of the photographer, a great advocate of life
and nature and their preservation within the core of her innermost tenets.
Top priority had been to
prolongue Tracy´s life as much as possible, providing her all feasible comfort
and compassion and trying to ease her pains, but now her passing away was
approaching at an accelerated pace. The end of her life was very near.
Nothing could be made from
a medical viewpoint to save her. All of her vital functions were severely
damaged, she had great difficulties to breathe, and had lost a lot of
weight.
But Claire didn´t ever
want to stop working in this reportage and decided to go on getting pictures
until the burial of the little Tracy. Her choice was to suffer with her and
love her. She was immersed in a very important time in the history of children
with AIDS and she had to document it, because she wanted people to know and
remember these children, albeit they were on earth for such a short time.
THE DEATH
After a lot of suffering,
Tracy finally died on June 29th, 1991, which brought about a collective
emotional shock among the people who had taken care of her: doctors, nurses and
Claire.
All of them had loved her
and would have her in mind for the rest of their lives.
Claire Yaffa took two more
photographs of Tracy:
© Claire Yaffa
one depicting the little
bed in which she had been the last five months of her life, full of different
toys, balloons with messages, sheets of paper with messages for her and a
number of medical devices and cables.
Loneliness had held sway
of the room. Silence and affliction ruled everything. Tracy
wouldn´t be there
again.
© Claire Yaffa
Shortly after, Claire got
the last picture of Tracy inside her opened coffin, dressed in white attire and
with her head surrounded by flowers.
Only three people attended
Tracy´s interment. Claire was one of them.
PRIDE AND SADNESS
THROUGHOUT TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS
Twenty-eight years have
elapsed since Tracy´s death on June 19, 1991, and throughout all this time, her
remembrance has become a consubstantial part of Claire´s life.
Sadness pervades a
significant percentage of those memories, along with a question without answer
that the photographer has asked herself time and again:
Could the little Tracy
feel any of the love given to her at any moment?
Other times, a further
question arises: Could she have done any more to help her?
But the elapse of time
hasn´t dwindled the recollections of every experience shared beside Tracy during
her last months of life, but has fostered them.
Tracy goes on being
increasingly present after twenty-two years and she will never be forgotten.
But the photographer is
also very proud of the work she did, very hard to carry forward and whose
significance and far-reaching scope went far beyond photojournalism.
© Claire Yaffa
Anyway, the breathtaking
black and white pictures of Tracy taken by Claire during late 1990 and between
January-June 1991 have paid off, contributing to better understand this illness
and to create a social cognizance about the need for looking after children
with AIDS, coming to know and love them, so images have become a poignant
reminder giving voice to so young human beings afflicted by this disease.
In this regard, during the
last 29 years there have been a lot of advances in treatment and nutrition alike
which have proved to be instrumental to extend the patients´ life and improve
their existence quality, unlike Tracy´s time when chances for recovery were
almost zero.
In addition, Claire´s
photographs of Tracy are also a stirring tribute documenting the highly
praiseworthy devotion of caretakers to help them.
And as long as more and
more people get involved in this fight, hope will never be lost.
The photographs from A
Dying Child is Born are in the permanent collection of the International Center
of Photography in New York, and some of them have been included in the New York
Historical Society exhibition Children with AIDS: Spirit and Memory.
Photographs by Claire Yaffa , held between June 7, 2013 and September 1, 2013.
For more information on Calire Yaffa go here
For other articles on this blog please click on Blog Archive in the column to the right
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Thank you José Manuel Serrano Esparza for allowing me to publish this article. I got to know Claire Yaffa a while ago and she was so kind to send me several of her books. They are all excellent works of art, but "A Dying child is Born" had a special impact on me. You described the difficulties of taking the photographs very eloquently. I don't think I would have been able to take this series of photographs, leave alone write about it. Thank you again for being part of this blog.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but Leicas or no Leicas, what's presented here is essentially the same photograph, over and over and over.
ReplyDeleteHow would you approach this assignment to eliminate taking "essentially the same photograph, over and over and over?"
DeleteHeinz, you probably won't get an answer. This is a comment by a typical complainer who has no idea what the photographer was up against, leave alone any answers of how to do it better.
Delete