SILENCE and Sheets
Along the corridors of Berlin's care homes, the arrival of the first COVID-19 vaccines in the winter of 2021 carried a meaning that went far beyond mere medical prophylaxis.
For months, the daily battle against the virus had unfolded in the shadow of an equally debilitating enemy: forced isolation. Inside these facilities, strict adherence to safety protocols had ultimately severed the most fundamental human connections, turning health preservation into a daily cage of loneliness where even a shared glance or a handshake had become an inaccessible luxury.
The rollout of the vaccination campaign by mobile medical teams represented, above all, a crack in that wall of silence. In the residents' accounts, anxiety about the pandemic took a backseat to a visceral need to feel the physical presence of their loved ones once again, breaking a routine made of conversations filtered through screens or glass panels, and countless stories of solitude.
Among the photographs capturing those moments, the visual details convey that distance better than any words could.
The images capture elderly residents sitting at the edge of their rooms, their eyes fixed on the doorway waiting for medical staff or resting on old family photographs arranged on nightstands. In another frame, the contrast is even starker: on one side, the sterile armor of healthcare workers, white hazmat suits, face shields, and double gloves—and on the other, the vulnerability of time-worn hands seeking eye contact, as if trying to reclaim, through a single dose of the vaccine, the simple possibility of being held by the outside world once again.
