Tag Archives: Time magazine

“Covering” COVID In Westport

As we end the first week of our new, hunker-down normal, plenty of people have time on their hands.

Not to mention, Time on their hands.

The newsmagazine — which, honestly, I did not know still existed — has published a special online edition about the pandemic. There are 6 different covers.

The very first one shows a 51-year-old Stamford woman. As the text explains, she was infected at a Westport party.

When photographer Angela Strassheim went recently to visit Cheryl Chutter in Stamford, Conn., she was there not on assignment, but as a friend. Chutter, 51, was diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 17.

Chutter was on her first day of quarantine, and Strassheim had come by to leave some food for Chutter and her son outside the door. As she approached the house, she saw Chutter in the window wearing a face mask, and was struck by how powerfully the mask seemed to visually convey the frustration, fear and isolation her friend was feeling. Strassheim asked if she could take a quick photo on her iPhone, and came back the next day with her camera. “For me it sums up where we are at right now. We are all imprisoned in our homes and the window is like a mirror to look back at ourselves,” she says. “You are that same person in your own home whether you have the mask on or not.”

Chutter thinks she was infected when she attended a birthday party in Westport, Conn., in early March. About a week after the gathering, she learned that one of the attendees, who had recently traveled abroad, had tested positive for COVID-19. By then, she had already been once to a hospital and once to an urgent care facility due a high fever, chills, body aches and utter exhaustion. But it was only after she discovered she’d been in contact with someone at the party who was diagnosed with COVID-19 that she was able to get a test, since kits were so scarce.

When she finally received her positive test result on March 17—after eight days in quarantine—she said one word: “Relief, I felt relief. I knew now that my dad can get tested. I just want to be safe. I want to take care of my son, be considerate to other people and I don’t want to leave my house till quarantine is over.” Since the party, 20 attendees have tested positive.

Entering her second week of quarantine, Chutter is trying to stay positive, but the social isolation—especially the forced estrangement from her son—is emotionally challenging. “I was told to have as little contact with my son as possible,” she says. “I can’t prepare meals for him. I wear a mask and gloves in the house. I can’t be near him.” —Paul Moakley and Alice Park

(For this, and Time’s other stories on coronavirus victims, click here. Hat tip: A dozen-plus readers.)

Miggs Burroughs: Time For Merle Haggard

Most Westporters knew Merle Haggard — if they knew him at all — as the singer-songwriter of the proud-to-be-a-hippie-hater “Okie From Muskogee.”

But Miggs Burroughs knew Haggard — who died Wednesday, on his 79th birthday — in a different way.

More than 40 years ago — in June of 1973 — Time Magazine asked the 27-year-old artist to create the cover for a story on the country music “outlaw hero.”

“I wasn’t a fan at the time,” Miggs recalls.

“I painted it on real barn siding to make it look as haggard as possible. I liked it, they liked it, and proofs were printed.”

The Time cover readers never saw.

The Time cover readers never saw.

But Merle complained, and the editors swapped Miggs’ artwork out for a photographic cover.

He sighs. “Then it was me who looked haggard.”

PS: 14 months later, Miggs painted another Time cover — the one announcing Richard Nixon’s resignation. The disgraced president didn’t like hippies either.

Tyler Hicks Photo In Time’s Top 10

Time magazine has announced its Top 10 Photos of 2013. Included in the images — nearly all of disasters, either natural or man-made — is a shot from September’s mall massacre in Nairobi, Kenya.

Staples graduate Tyler Hicks — a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times photographer who lives nearby — raced to the scene. He took this shot:

Tyler Hicks Time photo

Tyler described the scene this way, in Time:

It was clear that something catastrophic was developing when I arrived at Nairobi’s upscale Westgate Mall. Gunfire had been reported, and I witnessed hundreds of victims streaming out of the building, many of them shot and bloodied. I realized this was the attack people had warned about since I moved here two years ago. Al Shabab militants were waging a violent attack on a crowded target frequented by foreigners.

After photographing the panic outside, I turned my focus to finding an approach into the mall, where I found a small number of disorganized Kenyan police and army, mixed with terrified masses trying to escape the attackers. From an upper floor I moved to the balcony of the atrium to glimpse the bloodshed below.

Bodies of victims lay lifeless where they fell, and among them a terrified woman remained stranded with two children in a café. They remained there, petrified, with quiet, everyday music continuing to play over the mall’s sound system.

I took some photographs and then retreated from the exposed position. The woman and children were later rescued unharmed.

Lynsey Addario In Afghanistan

Westport is justly proud of our trio of world-famous photojournalists:  Lynsey Addario, Tyler Hicks and Spencer Platt.  All are Staples graduates from the 1980s.

Last week, both Lynsey (the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and a 2009 Pulitzer Prize) and Tyler (who shared that 2009 Pulitzer for International Reporting) have had gripping photos in the New York Times, from Afghanistan and Haiti.

Now check out the February 21 edition of Time magazine.  Lynsey has contributed an insightful photo-essay on medical evaluation units in Afghanistan.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Famous Photographers School made Westport proud.  Five decades later, 3 home-grown photojournalists are doing the same.

Lynsey Addario captures the urgency of a medical evacuation. (Photo courtesy of Time magazine)