In early 2021, more than a year after the Covid-19 pandemic began, vaccines for the disease had finally become available. Photographer Linda Alterwitz was curious about the vaccine’s effects after a neighbor complained of continued pain in her arm nine days after she received it. Using a camera that registers heat, rather than light, Alterwitz was astonished to see dark, contrasting patterns on her friend’s arm that spread out toward her breast and shoulder. This photograph—intimate, ephemeral, scientific, and moving—led to Injection Site, in which she photographed the arms of more than 130 participants from 2021to 2023. Alterwitz explained to each person that she was using a heat camera to make thermographic images, rendering visible their bodies’ reactions to the Covid vaccine. She emphasized to the participants that it was not a scientific experiment, but a unique way of documenting the pandemic.
Injection Site illustrates a moment when the entire world faced a common threat and extends the ongoing examination of how Covid-19 has shaped our collective consciousness. The photographs—showing spidery networks of veins, splotches, and other visible marks of inflammation in the human body—provoke curiosity about how our experiences could be simultaneously intensely individual but also universal. Although the memory of the pandemic may no longer sit at the forefront of our minds, it continues to create anxiety about our future. We continue to live amid a perfect storm of global warming, overpopulation, habitat loss, and global migration that brings us ever closer to the next planetary threat.