April 19: Week in Photography
Your lens to the internet's most powerful photographs. 📸 MOST POWERFUL PHOTO OF THE WEEK 📸  Joy Malone / Reuters While some countries are cautiously looking to lift lockdown rules, the ideas of closeness, intimacy, and connection have already been transformed. Hashim, an essential worker in the health care industry, greets his daughter through the closed door as he maintains social distance from his family as he works amid the COVID-19 outbreak in New Rochelle, New York, April 11.
 WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! 📸
Share your images of social distancing, springtime, and some of the feelings of being indoors for quarantine.
Images can be submitted here, and the most compelling picture will be shared in JPG in the coming weeks. 📸For Your 👀 Only: SMALL WORLDS, BIG CONSEQUENCES With the entire world shut down in response to a seemingly invisible enemy, the few photos that we have of the novel coronavirus seem both otherworldly and banal. How can something so small, so alien-seeming, wreak such havoc? The images that do exist are taken for granted, stand-ins that represent a slow-moving social and economic catastrophe. That images exist of the virus at all is remarkable — especially since they are illustrations. We spoke with Professor Michael Peres, who teaches biomedical photographic communications at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, to explain this technical process.
What are the steps it takes to make a picture of a virus?
Michael Peres: It's a process that starts out with the virus that is collected in some way shape or form, and taken to a place that’s safe. Ebola, SARS, HIV, and many other viruses that have infected humans are of course dangerous and the management of those viruses, dead or alive, is important.
 CDC / Getty Images You have to be efficient, because these biological materials can’t be in a microscope and bombarded with electrons for infinite amounts of time without them changing or being destroyed.
So this is a super technical process that results in a drawing?
Yup! The microscope uses electrons, not light, and they can be super expensive; they have resolutions that are on the scale of nanostructure and are measured using Angstroms, super high-res instruments that can easily go to 100,000 times magnified. They look at things that are infinitely tiny, so tiny that you know on a light microscope if you were even able to detect one, that would be extraordinary.
 Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images If the EM images require further enlargement with clarity, there is now the need to make an illustration or a derivative piece based on what can be seen within the image. In the illustration, color and other elements of the drawing are somewhat speculative, because no one has actually seen the virus in color, the way that you’re seeing them illustrated. What we see is an interpretation of what we believe we saw in an image by a highly trained illustrator.
What is the training?
Professional education in imaging is not at the same scale as you might expect. You don’t go to school really to be an electron microscopist. You don’t go to school to be a light microscopist. It’s a tool used in science and different organizations have different access to different equipment. It's often just on-the-job training, OJT. At RIT, we have a photographic sciences degree program where light and scanning electron microscopy are possible class choices.
 Universal Images Group via Getty Images So someone who is working on a master’s in biology might have access to a SEM or TEM or other cohorts in places called imaging centers. The highest number of scientists that are working probably don’t have any formal imaging training. Their craft is about science, and they use the microscope as a tool, like beakers.
What is the importance to science in seeing what the virus looks like?
I think, like any process, where people are learning new things, visualized data helps people to analyze and then deduce. It's like trying to describe a color in words, describe blue in words. You can’t do it. Pictures help a scientist describe a procedure or a process or an organism in a way that words would be woefully inadequate alone
 U.S. National Institutes of Health via Getty Images  📸THE WEEK'S PHOTO STORIES FROM BUZZFEED NEWS 📸 This week, we see more closely the toll the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is taking on society — both economically and socially, from the view of health care workers, emergency responders, essential employees, and protesters. We also see tempers start to fray in the United States as ongoing lockdown measures hurt the economy. Finally, as a reminder of new beginnings, we take a look at the start of springtime around the world.
PICTURES FROM THE FRONTLINES  John Moore / Getty Images "I want these pictures and this story to be more than just statistics — I’d like people to really see what it looks like."
FREEDOM FROM QUARANTINE  Jeff Kowalsky / Getty Images Conservative demonstrators gathered at the capitol buildings of Michigan, Kentucky, and North Carolina to protest against stay-at-home orders during a pandemic that has already left more than 26,000 Americans dead.
🌷SPRING IN BLOOM🌷  Michele Tantussi / Reuters Take a mental pause from your self-quarantine with a breathtaking reminder that the natural world is still as beautiful as it ever was.
📸YOUR WEEKLY PALATE CLEANSER 📸  Patrick Smith / Getty Images Best to stay busy when at home bored! Adhering to Ohio's stay-at-home order due to the coronavirus outbreak, Zachary Skidmore bench-presses using his handmade outdoor gym equipment on April 15 in Jackson, Ohio. Skidmore, a former US Army police officer and part-time personal trainer, constructed his “Lumber Jacked Gym” entirely out of timber over a two-week period. The seven-station setup, which includes a cable fly machine, bench press, treadmill, and leg press, was designed as a way to help him stay fit during the COVID-19 pandemic — which shut down his local gym — and landed him at his parent’s home for the quarantine.
"That's it from us this time — see you next week!" —Gabriel and Kate “Photography is a love affair with life.” —Burk Uzzle
📝 This letter was edited and brought to you by the News Photo team. Gabriel Sanchez is the photo essay editor based in New York and loves cats. Kate Bubacz is the photo director based in New York and loves dogs. You can always reach us here.
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