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Photo Stories
ALL IMAGES © DAVID COLLYERW
hen David Collyer saw his
photograph on the front page
of The Guardian, he nearly fell
off his bike. When he saw the
two pages of pictures inside, he bought every
copy from the garage on his way to his job as an
operating department practitioner at the Nevill
Hall Hospital in Abergavenny. It’s been a long
ride for the committed 52-year-old
documentary photographer. His enthusiasm
began as a teenager shadowing Terry Habgood,
chief photographer at the Surrey Advertiser.
David moved to Abergavenny from Bristol in
2017, a conscious decision to downgrade his
NHS position and spend more time having a
life outside work, and to concentrate more on
his photography. It was both that propelled him
to the front page. David had been considering
documenting the fi nal year of Nevill Hall in
some way before it underwent signifi cant
changes. He immediately recognised
COVID-19 presented an important
opportunity, making the immediate decision
not to photograph patients. ‘I wanted to get the
project off the ground very quickly; once you
go down the route of shooting patients, it’s a
lot more diffi cult to get ethical clearance from
the trust, you also have to get permission from
patients, family members, a lot of the patients
are in an induced coma, how do you get
permission from them?’ he explains.
By turning the camera on his colleagues, his
photographs humanise the NHS workers being
eulogised on the streets and in homes across
Britain. ‘I wanted to show the whole range of
emotions they go through and what we’re
having to deal with. There’s a real dark sense of
humour in health care, you can see people
messing around and having fun because
something exciting is happening, something
out of the ordinary, something big, it gets the
adrenaline going and then as things wear on,
you can see people are being worn down by it.’
More than 90 images David shot on shift
have been turned into a book, All in a Day’s
Work, published by Static Age (profi ts go to
mental health charities MIND and Campaign
Against Living Miserably). The book is an
intense and confi ned document of real life
drama performed in and around operating
theatres, views of the outside world are absent.
‘You have Personal Protective Equipment
(PPE) on which makes it even more
claustrophobic. Until you’ve been in that
situation where you’re wearing full PPE it’s very
diffi cult for an outsider to understand what it
feels like. Just the act of putting a mask on
you’re rebreathing in carbon dioxide, you get
very tired, very sleepy, your thought process
gets slightly dulled. You’ve got the added
diffi culty wearing things that are raising your
body temperature, making you incredibly hot
so you’re sweating, you’ve got a visor on and
are very closed in.’Tools for the job
For the gruelling shifts, David opted for his
Olympus XA3 over Leica M3. The size of the
XA3 allowed it to hang unobtrusively under his
scrubs, the zone focusing allowed him to be
quick and crucially, it was easy to wipe clean.
The 800 ISO rated Kodak Tri-X fi lm was
developed in a Rodinal dilution of 1:50, the
negs then scanned with a Plustek 8100. That’s
a lot of work after a distressing day, why not
digital? ‘I wanted to stay true to myself. I’ve
been shooting fi lm for the last three years,
partly because I love the process. I found with
digital that I was getting lost, spending too
much time looking at the back of the camera.
Film really concentrated me. I know I can shoot
a roll and have it scanned in two hours. I wasn’t
planning on putting it out as a news story
initially, it was never designed to get into a
newspaper quickly. Technically these photos
aren’t my best work but in terms of having a
narrative, they do exactly what I set out to do.’
What David set out to do, he has done well,
learning from the biography of his hero Sir Don
McCullin that you soon realise what you’re cut out
to do, great photography takes dedication and a
refusal to compromise. There’s an intimacy to the
images beyond the press photos seen a thousand
times of an incubated patient surrounded by staff.
Absorbing David’s photos leaves the eyes
almost as shattered as the staff themselves.All in a
d a y ’s w o r k
Peter Dench speaks to a photographer with
unique access to the NHS front line
Clockwise from top: Waiting to remove PPE after
an infected case. Exhausted after four hours. A
moment of reflection. Mascara for morale. A light
moment at the end of a long shift