Photo Friday: We are all Patients in the End (Wonderful what can be done with a paintbrush)

We Are All Patients in the End

This is for you, Susannah Fox – This week’s photograph is of Regina Holliday and Cindy Throop who helped organize a flash mob in Dupont Circle. Regina’s shown myself and others of the power of the artists’s brush in creating change. I wouldn’t have envisioned this a year ago for health care.

The scene on Tuesday reminded me of another photograph I took a few weeks ago, while at BWI airport. It is of a letter written to Thurgood Marshall in 1954 about his efforts – “It is really wonderful what can be done with these television cameras.” Less than a mile from the spot Regina is standing is where Justice Marshall planned the strategy to overturn school segregation. The building is now called the Thurgood Marshall Center, pictured below.

3 Comments

Thank you! I was just thinking about how my work as a survey researcher (and sometime ethnographer) is a bit like painting. I talk quite a bit about capturing "portraits" of the population, but my paintbrush is broad — I paint with numbers, talking about people in the aggregate most of the time. When I do get a chance to bring it down to an individual level, it's esp. satisfying because that's where the storytelling can become personal. It's not "61% of adults" but this one person telling what happened to them and how it relates to the point I'm making with the data.

Ted Eytan, MD