Of hearts and healing

Young Chang

A gauze bandage on a child’s soft skin and the happy face drawn in

black ink that smiles out from it.

A stethoscope on an untoughened chest -- the feel of cold metal that

comes rushing back from days when you, too, were young. When the hospital

seemed a scary place to be.

The miracle of heart surgery, the everyday-ness of matters involving

life and death.

Walter Urie saw art in these hospital moments -- in the doctors who

wake up every morning to save people’s lives, in the children who grow to

be adults after fearing they wouldn’t.

His collection of 24 black and white photographs -- half showing heart

surgeries in progress at the Heart Institute at Children’s Hospital, Los

Angeles; half showing children in intensive care units, where they’re

taken after surgery -- hang in Orange Coast College’s Fine Arts Building

through May 22. Urie is an adjunct faculty member there and teaches

documentary photography.

The pieces take up two walls in a short hallway called the Photo

Gallery. It’s an area merely for passing through, blocked at one end by a

counter where students can check out photography equipment and lined

along another wall with darkrooms.

Stunning in their authenticity and moving because most things

involving children are, the exhibit displays a world of medicine and

healing in the unlikeliest of places. Urie intended it this way.

“So when the students come out of the darkrooms, and they’re looking

at their prints, I wanted them to have prints on the wall that they could

use as their benchmark, to get a sense of sequential imagery,” Urie said.

But they’re getting much more than a free lesson.

For Urie, a commercial and advertising photographer, it was a sense of

the immediate that tied together the world of doctors and the world of

photographers. What began last year as a project for the hospital’s

brochure soon became, no pun intended, a personal matter of the heart.

“I know to do my job well I need to be completely in the present,

completely conscious of what’s going on in the moment, because that’s

where photography happens -- in the moment,” he said. “And watching the

surgeons work, they also need to be completely in that moment of time.”

Face masks, surgical scissors against weak flesh, overhead lamps,

patches of the human body, cartoon-covered bandages and hospital gowns

for juniors are some of the images shown in Urie’s inconspicuously

located exhibit.

“It really kinda puts it in [students’] face,” said Eve Luckring, an

instructor of photography at OCC.

Luckring said that Urie’s work echoes a style of documentary

photography associated with Eugene Smith, a photographer who documented

the work of country doctors and nurse midwives.

“In some ways, this is a contemporary version of this. We have

high-tech surgery now,” she said. “There is a historical record to

medical photography and documentary photography that explores this.”

But for Urie, a father to two grown children, the project is something

more humbling than a show of art.

“I really tried very hard to make these photographs in such a way that

attention would not be drawn to the photographs themselves, but simply to

the subject,” he said. “I made these photographs to honor the subjects,

not to show off my photography.”

FYI

WHAT: Walter Urie’s photographs from the Heart Institute at Children’s

Hospital, Los Angeles

WHEN: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday until May 22

WHERE: Orange Coast College’s Fine Arts Building, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa

COST: Free

CALL: (714) 432-5520