This 27-by-38-inch panorama documents the trauma room at University Metro Hospital in Cleveland—the clinical space where medical teams treat the most severely injured patients in life-or-death circumstances. The moderate dimensions focus attention on a space designed for intensive intervention rather than architectural display.

Created in 1992, the work represents unusual documentation of medical infrastructure, capturing the equipment, layout, and clinical environment where emergency medicine practitioners work to save lives. The trauma room’s design reflects decades of medical research into optimal configurations for treating multiple trauma patients with maximum efficiency.

The trauma room combines medical equipment, monitoring systems, and spatial organization developed through experience with thousands of critical patients. Every element—lighting, equipment placement, access points—has been refined to enable rapid response when seconds determine outcomes.

The photo collage technique captures this clinical environment from multiple perspectives, the assembled composition revealing equipment and spatial relationships that single-frame photography might not communicate. The fragmented view echoes the trauma team’s multiple simultaneous focuses: airway, breathing, circulation, and injury assessment proceeding in parallel.

This documentation provides rare access to spaces patients experience only under extreme circumstances and most observers never see. The trauma room represents medical infrastructure whose design and equipment embody accumulated knowledge about saving human lives under the most challenging conditions.