The Shot is a monthly series showcasing top photojournalism from staff photographers at The Associated Press.

Each month, AP photographers will share the stories behind some of their iconic imagery.

In the third post of this series, photographer Emilio Morenatti talks about his experience photographing assignments in Spain under challenging circumstances during the pandemic in 2020.

Produced by AP News staff. The presenting sponsor was not involved in the creation of this content.

Emilio Morenatti

Although I have been through many difficult situations throughout my career as a photojournalist, having suffered grave combat injuries and being held hostage in a conflict zone, I have never felt as vulnerable as I did during those long first weeks covering the pandemic in Spain. Supplies of protective suits, masks and hand sanitizer had quickly disappeared from stores. Strict curfews were in force. Hospitals and primary care centers had collapsed.

We had to improvise our approach to covering the story amid conditions that demanded solutions to problems we didn’t fully understand yet, in much the same way I’ve experienced while working in conflict zones.

Following the front-line medical workers visiting COVID-19 patients at home in the days before AP could send the appropriate protective equipment meant I had to create my own. I used trash bags to make protective plastic suits and bleach to make disinfectant for my hands as well as my photo equipment. Stuffed into big plastic bags like the nurses I was following, we suffered from perspiration that fogged up our glasses and even my cameras.

To capture the desolation of a city like Barcelona in lockdown, where the roar of traffic and hum of people in the streets had been replaced by only the cries of birds overhead and wind passing through the trees, I spent hours combing through the city streets on my electric scooter. One moment that encapsulated this sensation was a scene of a homeless man sleeping in the middle of one of Barcelona’s busiest streets the morning of April 17, 2020.

Seeing that man sleeping on a pedestrian street full of souvenir shops and restaurants once teeming with tourists, was like witnessing an apocalyptic scene. I photographed the man using the 35mm and 50mm lenses as he lay asleep in the same posture. Eventually a police patrol arrived and helped him up to the sidewalk.

I felt very privileged to be a journalist allowed to leave my house during a very difficult confinement. However, this privilege came with the heavy burden of worry that I could bring the virus back into my own home and infect my family members. To avoid this, I separated myself from my wife and children during a period of months. We divided our apartment into the “dirty” half where I would sleep, eat, and work, and the “clean” half where Marta lived with Gala, age six, and Pau, age four.

Not being able to hold my children or my wife during that time made it difficult to sleep and provoked anxiety attacks in the face of all the uncertainty in which we were living. The hardest period of confinement, where I was completely separated from my family, lasted more than two months. Then I continued to maintain a somewhat softer confinement, although keeping my distance with my two children, 4 and 6, and with my wife for approximately another two months.

With so many impediments to access in public places like hospitals and cemeteries, I relied on my own network of friends, colleagues and family members to find the frontline workers who would let me document their stories. I began to form relationships with the ambulance drivers, nurses, and gravediggers that allowed me to gain access that was constantly being denied through official channels. This approach gave AP the edge over the competition and provided exclusive access to the most difficult stories at the time.

The image of mortuary workers collecting the body of COVID-19 victim next to a sleeping resident who was unaware of what was occurring in the bed across from them had a big impact on public opinion in Spain. No publication had achieved such access before. The pictures I made became the first that showed COVID-19 deaths in the elderly homes where the pandemic had hit the hardest, preying on those most vulnerable. The unassuming presence of the Alpha a9ii – a mirrorless camera makes no noise -- was crucial to working in these delicate situations.

Seeing the loneliness of those deaths that passed in solitude and without goodbyes made a big impact on me. I still remember the sound of zippers breaking the dead silence as mortuary workers sealed elderly corpses into body bags. After publishing this and other photographs I received a multitude of messages from families who were not able to say goodbye to their parents or grandparents who had passed away alone in elderly homes.

I also received messages from others who said they related to the sense of loneliness they saw imbued in my pictures. Some thanked me for my efforts to document and raise awareness about what was happening, others condemned me for publishing such difficult and intimate moments.

One day I heard on the local radio that a retirement home was organizing meetings between residents and their families through a plastic barrier. I knew that I had to drop everything and pursue this story.

I went to the retirement home with a portfolio of my recent work and publications highlighting my coverage of seniors receiving primary care, in hope that the director would see the quality of our reporting. He was moved by the work and allowed me access to one of the most emotional scenes I have photographed throughout the whole pandemic.

When 81-year-old Agustina and 84-year-old Pascual were reunited after 102 days of separation (the first time the couple had been apart during their 59-year marriage) it was as if time stood still. A seemingly eternal kiss made the plastic barrier disappear along with all the distance and fear that had kept them apart for so long.

That morning turned out to be an extremely busy one that produced not one but two powerful images. Meeting Agustina and Pascual coincided with the general rehearsal in the Liceo Theatre. So almost without saying goodbye to the couple I had to rush with my motorbike to make it to the Theatre on time. When I arrived I barely had a few minutes before the rehearsal finished, so I hastily ran up the stairs to the last floor. When I leaned out, I could see the unusual scene.

When I immortalized that extraordinary view, I felt my heart beating fast, not only because of the stress of the climb, but also because of the emotion of that eternal kiss between Agustina and Pascual. I once heard a veteran photojournalist say that in this job, you have to have the ability to laugh and cry, often with just a split-second difference.

Every picture has a story behind it, and this is a wonderful one. Back in July 2020, the ambulance crew I was following, whose mission was responding to COVID-19 emergencies at home, answered a call reporting the death of an old man. I managed to photograph the man’s wife and daughter as they witnessed the medical team trying to bring their loved one back to life. The moment was so tragic and intense that I could not obtain their permission to publish the pictures, something I always do when I photograph in the homes of strangers.

It took months to get in touch with the family. Then Aurelia, the daughter, agreed to meet with me in her home. I explained to her what the AP does. I showed her an extensive portfolio of my work, at the end of which I had placed the picture I made of her father’s passing. She cried when she saw it as did I along with her. With her eyes full of tears, she asked me to publish it, saying that the photograph did justice to the tragic moment she had so intimately experienced.

To this day Aurelia follows my work and reaches out to me when she sees a powerful story that could work for the wire, like the recent story of her 90-year-old friend Xavier who makes daily visits to his 92-year-old wife Carmen, through the street-level window of her retirement home in Barcelona. Since the beginning of the pandemic a windowpane has both separated and united this couple of 60 years. Aurelia spoke of me to Xavier which allowed him to trust me with telling his story of love and unity during these difficult times.

One photograph I pursued over various weeks was of a COVID-19 patient face to face with the sea. I visualized the scene days before I received permission from the hospital to make the picture. When the moment arrived, I executed the picture exactly the way I had envisioned by standing on a ladder and framing the patient in a way that situated him in the context of the long promenade with the sea in the distance.

I was careful to make the scene as compositionally tidy as possible, giving the subject enough space to breathe within the frame and ensuring no other elements would interfere with the central focus of the picture. I always come back to the same principle: the more you step back in a scene, the more things you see and the more possibilities you have for composing the image.

I had been searching for months for a picture of a large crowd wearing masks, something simple but impactful. I finally found the opportunity during one of Barcelona’s first pandemic test concerts without social distancing. I envisioned a picture taken from an elevated position so I brought a monopod the day of the concert upon which I fastened the Alpha 9II with a 16-35 2.8 and fired the shutter using the Sony RMT-P1BT remote. Thanks to the camera’s tilting screen I was able to control the composition from down below.

One morning I was in the kitchen preparing breakfast for the family when all of a sudden, I heard my 6-year-old daughter, Gala, speaking with someone from the outdoor patio. I went outside to see a spontaneous encounter between two friends and classmates who had climbed above the walls during a difficult confinement to spend time together. I hurried for my camera to capture the moment.

On the second night of violent protests to free Spanish rapper Pablo Hasél, who was arrested on charges of praising terrorist violence and insulting the monarchy, protesters had entrenched themselves in a large intersection, barricaded by burning motorcycles and building containers meant to block out the riot police who had amassed on every corner. The enormous flames lashed out as protesters threw rocks and bottles and police shot foam projectiles. The fire was so wild that you had to stand several paces back to avoid getting burned.

Suddenly, I saw two people embracing each other in the buffer zone between the protesters and the fire. I quickly looked through the viewfinder of my Sony A9II which had a 35mm f1.4 attached, and without even thinking about the autofocus, I shot a burst of around 5 or 7 frames as the couple shared a kiss all in the space of about a second. Immediately afterwards a column of police vans came crashing through the fiery barricade and the protesters began to flee.

As I photographed the scene unfolding before me, I forgot about the moment I had captured and only afterwards when I was editing my photos to send to AP, did I remember the photo of the kiss. I had the picture, but not their names nor the reason why they embraced each other in the middle of the fiery chaos. I still ponder these questions to this day.

Spotlight is the blog of AP Images, the world’s largest collection of historical and contemporary photos.

Produced by AP News staff. The presenting sponsor was not involved in the creation of this content.

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