Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
On February 14, 2021, I lugged two sea-bags, a camera bag, and a Pelican case off a chartered bus full of perfect strangers—though they each knew one another and had for years—up a concrete pier. The crew of the USS Carter Hall was embarking for its “COVID Cruise”; eight months, if we were lucky, at sea, with few opportunities to leave the ship—or the pier. I was boarding the ship as their photographer and journalist to document the work and lives of the crew at sea, work I’d never done on my own to that point. At the end of the routine deployment I would disembark without ceremony, never to board again.
