Photographer Ed Eckstein, who has documented nursing home residents for years, was a recent winner in AJN 's photojournalism contest, The Faces of Caring: Nurses at Work, and was the ideal photographer to illustrate this month's New Look at the Old series.
Eckstein's prize-winning photograph, featured on this month's cover, shows a nurse at Doylestown Hospital in Pennsylvania assisting a patient who is learning to walk with his new prosthesis after a leg amputation. The photograph above shows a different side to life in a nursing home: 100-year-old Lillie May Butler laughs as her pet dog plays in the yard of a Chicago nursing home sponsored by the Episcopal Church for retired clergy and their spouses (Ms. Butler's deceased husband was a minister). When she came out to play, Ms. Butler told the dog, "Young man, I'm dressed to kill today."
The photograph below-of a nursing home nurse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, assisting a resident-speaks for itself, Eckstein says.
"At a time when health care draws criticism for being depersonalized and mechanical, I was continuously impressed by the compassion of the care-givers I was privileged to photograph," Eckstein says. "I have found the smallest moments to be the most moving."
Eckstein, based in Easton, Pennsylvania, and New York City, has been a photographer for more than 30 years and can be contacted at [email protected].