Monday, 22nd March, 2021

Wonderful to catch up today with Scott Howell and his wife Helen and their daughter. Scott was the first patient with COVID-19 to be admitted to the Royal Gwent Hospital last year and was intubated and placed on a ventilator exactly one year ago today. The original plan was for Scott to be interviewed for BBC Wales with a number of the staff who had cared for him in ICU, but in the end I ended up doing all the interviewing! Immensely encouraging to see how well Scott is doing a year after a prolonged and stormy stay of over a month in ICU. To watch our BBC Wales news interview, click on the image above.  

Saturday, 21st February, 2021

I am still trying to take in the news that I have been awarded the AP 2021 Power of Photography Award for my COVID-19 documentary project. First published in 1884, Amateur Photographer is one of the world's most respected photography magazines and the AP annual awards have been likened to the BAFTAs of the British photography industry. The former recipients of the Power of Photography Award reads like a who's who of documentary photographers and I feel immensely privileged to be listed among their number. 

The award citation reads, "When it came to choosing the winner of our annual Power of Photography Awards, there was a clear winner- a truly impressive individual and image maker who was working right at the front line of one of the biggest emergencies this country has ever seen. Without Without a doubt, Covid-19, and its impact on us all, is the defining story of our generation. But it’s also one that traditional journalists and photographers haven’t always had front-line access to. As such, we’ve seen some remarkable imagery coming from those working within it. With unique access – and a special viewpoint from which to capture their shots – medical staff have provided an at-times unflinching look behind the scenes of an all-encompassing global tragedy. One photographer whose work stood out for a variety of reasons is that of Nick Mason."

The goals behind the project, from the moment when I was struck by the sight of ventilated patients tightly packed into the temporary ICU in theatre recovery and so many staff working in PPE, have been to document this genuinely historic episode in our history and to tell the stories of those affected by it: the staff in our NHS and the patients and their families who we are privileged to care for. Without these stories the pandemic becomes nothing more than numbers and graphs that we see on our television screens every evening, and numbers that are so large as to be meaningless and incomprehensible to us. In addition to the doctors and nurses, I have tried to document the stories of the unknown and unrecognised staff, often working behind the scenes for little pay, yet without whom we would never have got through the first wave of the pandemic. It is deeply gratifying that the receipt of this prestigious award would suggest that I have gone some way to achieving those goals.