Chatting the Pictures: Dina Litovsky’s Child Vax Portraits from the Kid’s Eye View

This photo was taken by Dina Litovsky for The New Yorker for a story about how New York City kids feel about getting vaccinated for the coronavirus. Here we see Anais Flores, a seven-year-old in the second grade, who said that getting her COVID-19 vaccine was like “a long nail poked into your body” but that the experience was also “great, and fun.”

In the video, we look at the photo and other images in the edit for the way they capture a sense of health, normalcy, and agency. We also contrast these photos with so many media images—influenced, perhaps, by anti-vaxx politics—that highlight looks of fear and pain as kids receive the shot. Finally, we illustrate how the photo takes its place in a long history of child vaccination images especially connected to back-to-school inoculations for such diseases as polio, the measles, and the flu.