​A New York frame of mind

Adam Gray is an English photographer who’s been in New York covering the COVID 19 pandemic. Talking about his nearest hospital there he told Derry: “If I get ill, that’s probably where I’ll go; I’ve seen more people coming out the back than in the front.” His words accompany grim images of workers taking body bags away from hospitals. 

It’s part of the transcript of a call that London-based director Ian Derry recorded when he reached out to Gray after seeing his powerful shots on Instagram. The transatlantic call lasted 90 minutes and came to form most of the voiceover of Eyewitness, Derry's moving film about Gray's coverage of the crisis.  

Derry has always been interested in the work of photojournalists. “Throughout history, these people have been on the frontline bringing us images that force us to confront the unspeakable,” he says. “They help humanise the numbers and statistics to make them comprehensible.”

They recruited DOP Michael Cimpher to document Adam at work in New York, Joe Walton at Whitehouse Post joined for the edit and James Wilson at Builders Tea created the music, drawing inspiration from the eerie soundscape used in TV series Chernobyl. “Nobody was paid for their time,” says Derry, “it was done to tell what we all thought was a story worth telling.”

The film closes with shocking aerial footage accompanied by the voiceover’s final sucker-punch: “20,000 [written] on the page doesn’t look as bad as pictures of mass graves.”