Injection Site Front Cover © Linda Alterwitz, MW Editions (2026)

There is something both beautiful and unsettling about seeing the invisible. Linda Alterwitz‘s new monograph, Injection Site, published by MW Editions, transforms the body’s hidden response to the COVID-19 vaccine into strange and unexpectedly beautiful portraits. What began with a simple question about a friend’s lingering pain grew into a three-year project involving 130 people, photographed with a thermal camera at different points after vaccination. The book captures the moment when the entire world faced a common threat. The photographs reveal spidery networks of veins, splotches, and other visible marks of inflammation in the human body. The photographs are evidence about how our experiences could be simultaneously intensely individual but also universal.

Injection Site is about much more than the affects of the vaccine. Created during a period when conversations about vaccination were often charged with fear, politics, and polarization, the project offered another point of view. The thermal photographs became a visual record of a collective experience while exposing how differently each body responds. The project was expanded into an interactive installation, where visitors were invited to respond anonymously to a simple question about why they did or did not receive the vaccine. In bringing these responses into the exhibition, Alterwitz transformed the gallery into a space for listening as well as looking. Injection Site asks how photography might make the invisible visible while also creating room for curiosity and conversation around an experience that affected all of us, but never in quite the same way.

An interview with the artist follows.

Injection Site front and back covers © Linda Alterwitz, MW Editions (2026)

© Linda Alterwitz, Michelle, 5 Days, from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

© Linda Alterwitz, Jaymi, 11 Days, from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

© Linda Alterwitz, Shinlei, 2 Hours, from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

© Linda Alterwitz, Kylie, 19 Days, from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

© Linda Alterwitz, Anonymous response to the question “Why did you or did you not receive the Covid-19 Vaccination?,” from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

© Linda Alterwitz, Jean-Paul, 2 Days and Joel, 3 Days, from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

© Linda Alterwitz, Foreword by Leah Ollman, Behold: Beneath: Within, published by MW Editions (2026)

© Linda Alterwitz, Jennifer, 2 Days from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

Injection Site

Injection Site was born out of curiosity, when a friend complained of pain in her arm nine days after her first Covid-19 vaccine. Using a thermal camera, I took photographs showing the inflammation response to the Covid-19 vaccine in the arms of 130 participants. Between 2021 and 2023, while the pandemic was ongoing, I photographed the subjects anywhere from twenty minutes to thirty days after vaccination.

By registering the heat of inflammation underneath the skin, the Injection Site photographs reveal each person’s unique response to the vaccine, thereby creating individual vaccination portraits.

I soon realized that this project could communicate far more than inflammation. I explained to each person who sat for me that I used a heat-sensing camera to make visible their reaction to the vaccine, emphasizing that it wasn’t a scientific experiment, but rather a unique account of the pandemic. Each portrait documents a visual trace of the subject’s reaction to the vaccine, giving us a glimpse of the usually mysterious inner working of our bodies. Rather than providing a simple scientific record, these distinctive portraits communicate empathy for the experience we shared when humans across the planet faced a new and frightening threat. It carries a deep sense of curiosity about how our experiences can be collective but at the same time so individual.

My intention was to create a safe space for viewers to ease into a discussion about the vaccine without fear or anxiety. Developed as a participatory artwork installation, I asked visitors to write their responses to the question, “Why did or didn’t you receive the Covid-19 vaccination?” I provided sticky notes for people to jot down their thoughts, and visitors applied them to the wall in a designated area of the exhibition space. As a result, Injection Site activated community and encouraged conversations with a tone of neutrality toward the vaccine controversy, and these responses became a significant element in the work.

Through the agency of the visual arts, I offered people a way to engage in a difficult subject. Injection Site was a safe way to address the polarized debate about the vaccine, moving the discussion away from political rhetoric and toward the human experience of the pandemic.

© Linda Alterwitz, Marvin, 3 Days from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

Tell us about your growing up and what brought you to photography…

I grew up in Gary, Indiana, in a forested area of sand dunes near the shores of Lake Michigan. My mother encouraged me to pursue the arts because I loved drawing and painting from an early age and showed an aptitude for both. In undergraduate school, I took photography classes with Richard Ross, but painting and drawing remained my primary focus through graduate school.

It wasn’t until decades later, following a medical crisis, that photography became central to my work. The diagnostic images that had become part of my life captivated me with their strange beauty and the vulnerability they revealed. I realized that painting no longer called to me. I returned to school at a local college to study digital photography, intending to use those medical images as source material for my work. It was then that I began working consistently with lens-based media.

A few years ago, I came across a photograph of my mother and father holding up seven-year-old me between them, with Lake Michigan in the background. Only recently did I notice that I was holding a Brownie camera. It was a funny realization—this little camera in my hands long before I had any idea that photography would eventually become such an important part of my life.

© Linda Alterwitz, Chet, 29 Days from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

The project began with a friend’s lingering pain after vaccination. Can you talk about that initial moment of curiosity and what made you reach for a thermal camera?

My neighbor Alice was complaining about pain in her arm. It had been nine days since her vaccination, and she told me she didn’t think the pain could still be related to the vaccine. My immediate thought was that I want to see the inflammation with the thermal camera. My mind just went there automatically, no hesitation. At that point, I wasn’t thinking about making a project. I was simply curious about what the camera might reveal.

But the minute I looked at her arm through the camera and saw the extensive inflammation extending from the injection site toward her breast, the project began to unfold in my mind. I realized this wasn’t just about Alice’s arm. It was about all of us, the time we were living through, the pandemic. I didn’t see aspects of the project as clearly then as I do now, but I knew almost immediately that it needed to become a participatory project involving as many people as I could find.

© Linda Alterwitz, Joanne, 1 ½ Hours from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

The thermal photographs reveal something happening beneath the skin that we normally cannot see. How did working with this technology change your understanding of the photographic portrait?

Is a medical scan of your body a portrait? What about a mammogram—is that only science? Working with thermal technology pushed me to think more deeply about those questions and about what a portrait can be. A portrait doesn’t necessarily have to describe the surface of a person. It can reveal something normally invisible, something happening beneath the skin, and still speak to an individual human experience.

This thinking leads directly to why I combine art and science in my work, and why that intersection is so integral not only to my practice, but to who I am. I’m interested in that place where the boundaries between the two begin to blur. William L. Fox, in his book Terra Antarctica, summed it up so eloquently: “If you broaden the definition of art to include the application of aesthetics in all the visible representation of the world that we construct, then you are dealing with a larger body of knowledge called visual culture. It’s within this larger arena that the differences between art and science begin to diminish and the similarities between the two modes of inquiry become more prominent.”

You photographed 130 people at different intervals following vaccination. What surprised you most about the range of individual responses you encountered?

It was remarkable just how different each person’s response to the vaccination was. Like a fingerprint, no two were alike.
Yet what surprised me most was how the project itself evolved. What began as a way of visualizing the body’s inflammatory response to vaccination became something much larger. Injection Site became a project rooted in trust and increasingly focused on choice and collective human experience.

© Linda Alterwitz, Ali, 2 Days from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

You were careful to explain that Injection Site was not a scientific experiment. How did you negotiate the space between scientific imagery, documentary photography, and art?

I think a lot of it has to do with the way I approached the project and how I talked about it with participants. I explained what I was doing in casual terms, not medical ones. I wasn’t collecting data or trying to draw scientific conclusions. The thermal camera was simply a way of seeing something the human eye couldn’t see.

The images themselves don’t look documentary to me. They move more toward abstraction. Leah Ollman, who wrote the foreword to the publication Injection Site, described this evocatively: “At times, skin looks like a pelt of another species. There are unfamiliar, irregular patches and patterns, bruise-like, spotty, spidery.”

So even though the technology has scientific and medical associations, my interest was in what it could reveal visually and experientially. The focus of Injection Site was the human experience and finding a visual language for that particular moment in the world.

How did the responses affect the work, and were there any reactions that changed or challenged your expectations?

The variety of responses reinforced my intention for the installation of Injection Site to create a safe space where people could talk about the pandemic and the vaccine without fear or anxiety. I became increasingly aware of how differently people had experienced that time, and how much emotion still surrounded it. I didn’t want the work to tell people what to think or how to feel. A lot of people interpreted the inflammation they saw in the images as scary or inherently bad, but I didn’t see it that way. I saw the images as revealing the individuality of our bodies and their responses. I wanted people to feel comfortable bringing their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences with vaccination to the work.

The responses helped shape my thoughts about the installation itself. I feel that the thermal images pull the viewer in, but as they look more deeply, it’s the combination of images and words—the individual experiences coming together—that gives the work its meaning.

© Linda Alterwitz, Isabella, 1 Day from Injection Site, published by MW Editions (2026)

Looking back now, what do you think Injection Site preserves about that moment our lives changes? Did creating the work change the way you see taking other medicines?

There was a kind of crazy energy during that time—a mixture of fear, uncertainty, and confusion. Injection Site doesn’t try to make sense of that period, but I think it preserves something of what it felt like to live through it. It offers a different perspective, bringing together science, art, and individual human experience.

Creating the work didn’t change my personal views on vaccination. What it did change was my understanding of other people and the reasons behind their personal decisions. Spending time with so many participants, listening to their experiences and concerns, gave me a greater sense of empathy for the complexity of those choices. I think that became as important to the project as the images themselves.

INJECTION SITE
By Linda Alterwitz with an essay by Leah Ollman
Published by MW Editions Distributed by D.A.P.

Linda Alterwitz (American, b. 1960) is an independent interdisciplinary artist with a focus on photography. For over two decades, her work has combined art and science exploring the unseen systems that shape our world and the relationships between humanity, technology, and the natural environment to encourage dialogue around choice, trust, and collective experience. Using a high-resolution thermal camera and other digital and analogue techniques, she visualizes phenomena beyond ordinary perception.

She has exhibited widely in traditional exhibition and site-specific installations at institutions including FORMAT25, Derby, UK; Museum of Art & History, Lancaster, CA – part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide Getty Initiative; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM, among others.

Alterwitz’s work is held in permanent collections including the Institute for Art + Environment, Reno, NV;  Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA; Hilliard Museum of Art, Lafayette, LA; Nelson Atkins Special Collections Library, Kansas City, MO; Santa Barbara Museum of Art Fearing Library, Santa Barbara, CA; Rochester Institute of Technology, Wallace Library, Rochester, NY, among others.

Recent awards include Nevada Arts Council Fellowship for Visual Arts 2025 and 2014, Individual Artist Grant from Healthy Communities Coalition 2023, NV, Individual Artist Grant 2020, Montana Arts Council, among others.

Instagram:c@lindaalterwitz

Leah Ollman has written about the visual arts for more than thirty years. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, and numerous other publications. She edited the anthology, Ensnaring the Moment: On the Intersection of Poetry and Photography, published by Saint Lucy Books in 2025.

In early 2021, more than a year after the Covid-19 pandemic began, vaccines for the disease had finally become available. Photographer Linda Alterwitz was curious about the vaccine’s effects after a neighbor complained of continued pain in her arm nine days after she received it. Using a camera that registers heat, rather than light, Alterwitz was astonished to see dark, contrasting patterns on her friend’s arm that spread out toward her breast and shoulder. This photograph— intimate, ephemeral, scientific, and moving— led to Injection Site, in which she photographed the arms of more than 130 participants from 2021 to 2023.The photographs—showing spidery networks of veins, splotches, and other visible marks of inflammation in the human body— provoke curiosity about how our experiences could be simultaneously intensely individual but also universal.

Instagram: @leahollman

Details
• ISBN: 9781969303036
• 9 x 10 inches
• 112 pages
• Clothbound with jacket
• 65 black and white photographs
• Publication date: September 2026
• $55

MW Editions is a New York City-based publisher of fine art and photography books.

MW values the tradition of book making, and strives to make each book a unique, beautiful, and desirable object in its own right. Their books are distinguished by their exceptional quality of design, materials, and printing.

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