Reverence

PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNN JOHNSONCLEVELAND, Ohio
“Reverence,” photographer Lynn Johnson says, remembering the moment when she and medical staff crowded around the human face laid carefully on the operating room table before them. 
Just the face, a living thing, clipped away from an organ donor, not yet attached to its next recipient. “It made one question everything we know and think about identity,” Johnson says.
 For more than two years her friend and fellow photographer Maggie Steber had been documenting the story of Katie Stubblefield, a young Cleveland Clinic patient whose own face had been obliterated in a gunshot suicide attempt when Katie was 18. 
The death of another young woman made possible the facial transplant process intimately documented by Steber, Johnson, and writer Joanna Connors in National Geographic’s September 2018 issue. 
The operation lasted 31 hours, and it was successful. Katie has continued working on speech and facial muscles, and recently said she hopes to attend college.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/best-pictures-the-decade-2010s/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=Photography_20191227&rid=F2A07B85CE5D19D2FABDF257FDAE459C