New York City in the Time of Coronavirus: Life Interrupted
As a documentary photographer, I am used to a constant schedule of global travel for my photography work. Our lives, the world over, have been interrupted by this pandemic. My travel wings have been clipped for now. I am used to covering global disasters, changing cultures, and issues concerning the human condition all over the world. Now that a crisis has come to my own city, I feel compelled to document it. I do so...
more »New York City in the Time of Coronavirus: Life Interrupted
As a documentary photographer, I am used to a constant schedule of global travel for my photography work. Our lives, the world over, have been interrupted by this pandemic. My travel wings have been clipped for now. I am used to covering global disasters, changing cultures, and issues concerning the human condition all over the world. Now that a crisis has come to my own city, I feel compelled to document it. I do so well-protected and from a safe social distance from people. This distance is a departure from how I usually work, but finding some story or connection with those whom I meet has been a universal theme throughout my photography projects around the world. This photo journal is simply my own musings of the people and places I encounter on my daily walks.
My photo exhibition, “Grit and Grace: Women at Work,” focusing on women working in global communities, was set to open on March 14 at Brattleboro Museum in Vermont. The museum closed down the morning it was set to open. The photographs sit in the museum unseen, although we are exploring virtual tours and the exhibition has been extended until October 14 in the hopes that people will actually get the opportunity to view it live. It’s been an unexpected evolution that this lock down has led me to focus on an under represented community of laborers in our own society: essential workers that keep our society humming along during this pandemic. These are the essential workers that we once took for granted such as garbage collectors, electrical technicians, transit drivers, delivery people, doormen, postal workers, cashiers, not to mention the brave frontline workers that include fire fighters, police, doctors and nurses. These are our unsung heroes.
This is a project born first out of curiosity of circumstance, then of gratitude to all those essential workers who kept our world humming, but always out of love for a city that has worked so hard together to keep each other safe. As a collective humanity, we mourn the world we once knew and together we must navigate the new life we create as we move forward. Capturing these small moments in time feels like I’m documenting a larger moment in history.
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