a photographer from Mulhouse gives her look at the tragedy of the epidemic

Two years ago, to the day, Mulhouse photographer Catherine Kohler pointed her lens at Emmanuel Macron, on an official visit to the Bourtzwiller police station. During this time, an evangelical gathering, future cluster, brings together thousands of faithful. A few weeks later, the Covid-19 epidemic swept through the Haut-Rhin prefecture. This is the starting point of “Shooting Covid”. A few weeks later, the hospitals are overflowing, the city is shut down and the army ends up setting up the tents of a field hospital at the foot of the CHU. There followed long months of struggle against what the photographer calls “the invisible enemy”.

The book is the result of the meeting and work of Catherine Kohler, accredited by the Sipa press agency, archivist and doctoral student in history David Bourgeois and journalist and editor Laure Peinchina. It retraces, through the photos and words of the photographer from Mulhouse, three months of a tragic and surreal period which will forever mark the history of Mulhouse.

A duty of memory…

On the cover, two figures in full white suits, gas masks on their faces, disinfect the surroundings of the Saint-Etienne temple. This scene captured on April 3, 2020 depicts part of the nightmare that photographer Catherine Kohler hopes exorcise thanks to this book. “I felt the need to go there, to take photos, to inform and to have a trace of all this page of history that was being written before our eyes. Everyone kept something something in him that is traumatic. I think that talking about it all together just does us good. This book is an object that can lead to discussion”.

These memories are still engraved in the memories and the flesh Mulhouse residents and the first visitors toexhibition taking place until May 31, 2022 in the municipal archives of Mulhouse. Thirty photos exhibited and preserved by the city’s archivists, among the thousands taken by the photographer

We have to remember that. For me it’s a return to life

Robert observes the photos of the military hospital installed in mid-March 2020 in the hospital parking lot. It is in one of these tents that he passes 43 days, plunged into a coma. “We have to remember it. For me it’s a return to life. It has to stay in the memory. It will mark this century”, this Mulhousien is moved. He still bears the marks of his long hospitalization: the scar of a tracheostomy.

Although they lived through these dark hours, here in Mulhouse, Marie-Claire and Jean-Marie discover through these pictures, the real extent of the disaster. “The vastness of the military hospital, we hadn’t seen it in real life. We still have a few friends who left, right from the start. We wanted to keep the memory of this period that we are going to put side, to talk about it a little later with the children and grandchildren.”

… cathartic

“The more we come back to a trauma, the easier it will be to move on. I think we are there now”, analyzes journalist and editor Laure Peinchina. She helped Catherine Kohler shape this story, halfway between a historical document and a logbook. Even, diary. “At first I said to myself that it had to be a duty of memory, preserved, shown in a book. Laure encouraged me to write down everything that happened, everything that I experienced. It was a sort of diary to which everything is told. After a while I felt freed from something that had been following me for a year and a half, which I had trouble getting rid of because it was traumatic what we went through. she delivers.

Seeing those cold stares through my lens, it froze me to the spot, I was petrified

Accustomed to photographing cultural events, rather festive, this work at the heart of the crisis threw her off balance. “I know that made a big impression on me. Seeing those icy stares through my lens froze me to the spot, I was petrified. Writing has done me a lot of good.”

“Shooting Covid”, by Catherine Kohler and Laure Peinchina, Médiapop Editions, 261 p., 20€.