Luiz Bicalho

2022 Senior Exhibition Artists

Luiz Bicalho

Art + Design: Photography

About Luiz Bicalho

Luiz Bicalho is an artist whose most recent project portrays the effects of the labor done by nurses and scientists amid the COVID19 public health crisis of 2020-22. The work contains portraits of healthcare workers as they exit a clinical shift. The photographs are displayed with photograms that show the tools and molecular analysis of bacteria that frame the steps of their routine. The work has been self-published as an artist book and displayed in an online Lenscratch group exhibition WHERE ARE WE NOW? 2022. He earned his BFA from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and is currently based in Worcester, MA. Luiz can be found working in his studio in New Bedford, MA.

Statment

Frontline Profiles

While being engulfed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the role of medical workers as well as the consequent nationwide staffing shortage of nurses are subjects that I find particularly important. The United States is producing about 170,000 nurses a year, but 80,000 qualified applicants were rejected in 2019 due to the lack of teaching staff.* Thus, I decided to investigate the present and future of nursing students.

My interest lies in paying tribute to the journey of nursing students enrolled in the Umass Dartmouth College of Nursing. Through photography, I capture the exhaustion of each worker as every weary detail on a face illustrates the hours of labor from clinical shifts done in different hospitals and labs. With the aid of the students Connor, Lydia and Cristalina I meet and photograph more nursing students. This process invites conversations about their future faced in the deficit of the market amid a crisis where more than 1,200 medical workers have died while working and being transferred between hot zones.*

My goal for this project is to portray the effects of the labor done by nursing students through heroic portraits along with photograms that show the tools and molecular analysis of bacteria that frame the steps of their routine. Photograms and scans in this case are more tactile than digital photographs since the process requires that I interact with the articles of their practice in order to document them. In this work I hope to bring a reflection from the audience about the subjects of the series, the importance of their profession, and the hardships faced. In my first weeks of accompanying these students we often discussed the risks and exploitation that come with the profession. Connor and two of his friends; Lydia and Julia, have pointed out that becoming a nurse is not done through circumstance or accident. No matter the risks and instabilities within the job, being a nurse is a choice. It is crucial that they become diligent and unflinching workers to maintain public health. An integral part of a nurse’s thinking is not dwelling on the hardships brought by the medical and political systems but to navigate through them to save lives.

*See ‘Nursing Is in Crisis’: Staff Shortages Put Patients at Risk, August 2021 by Andrew Jacobs for the New York Times.