November Virtual Narrative Medicine Rounds with Marvin Heiferman

"WHY WE LOOK: COVID and LOSS, PHOTOGRAPHY and CONSOLATION," a talk with Marvin Heiferman

For our November Rounds, we are thrilled to welcome Marvin Heiferman, photographer, writer, and curator, who will speak to us about grief and its work through photography and representation.  After Heiferman's husband Maurice Berger's COVID-related death in March 2020—when grief struck and words failed him— Marvin Heiferman suspected photography wouldn't.  Since then, daily postings of images and their accompanying captions on his Instagram account (@whywelook) have functioned as intimate, frontline reports on the experience and processing of grief. Widely viewed and written about, his online project has engaged thousands in a communal dialog. Chris Wiley of The New Yorker writes, "with his photographs, Heiferman makes visible grief's persistent ache, its loneliness, and its moments of poignant remembrance...Heiferman describes the images that he's created since Berger's death as representing 'the act of remembering itself.' In that sense, his picture speak to what we can hold on to and what, horribly, is lost forever."