In February 2005, Roger Tuttle and six other photographers, the Documentary Group, spent nearly 24 hours at the University of Utah Hospital recording the working lives of nurses. Despite some trepidation on his part, Tuttle was assigned to the burn trauma ICU. Shortly before his 6 AM arrival, a severely burned woman was brought in with chemical burns over much of her body. The photograph below, Burn Gang, was awarded an honorable mention in the 2005 photojournalism contest, The Faces of Caring: Nurses at Work, cosponsored by AJN, the New York University Division of Nursing, the Johnson and Johnson Campaign for Nursing's Future, and the Beatrice Renfield Foundation. The photographs on these pages depict a team of nurses at work on this patient. Burn Gang shows the nurses very carefully rotating the patient to apply ointment to her skin.
"The sounds and smells were intense," says Tuttle, adding that he "might have dropped over unconscious" if he hadn't been behind the camera. Of the nurses, who worked steadily dressing, cauterizing, and bandaging burned areas on this patient for more than two hours, he says: "The thing that amazed me was how well this team worked together. Each member stayed quietly focused on a task but at the same time was attentive to the needs of the others as well. The work itself was incredibly strenuous. It raised my appreciation for what nurses do-their teamwork, skill, and hard work[horizontal ellipsis]. At the same time, I got over my own demons." The patient, he says, survived.
Tuttle has been taking photographs for more than 30 years. He has worked as a photojournalist and a commercial photographer and is currently an adjunct instructor pursuing a master's degree in visual communication at the University of Utah, where he also has a job as a photographer for the marketing department. Other photographs by the Documentary Group have appeared on AJN covers, in September 2005 (Kevin Buehler) and January 2006 (Stephen Holt).
Jacob Molyneux