And here we are in a society of infinite luxury. With not just sofas, but air
conditioners, jet planes and limitless fried food. And here also now people
had become the danger. If we all retreated to our houses how long would it
take to run out of food? I dusted off my Skype account and retreated to my
basement to find out but I quickly started to go stir crazy. I was anxious, like
everybody was anxious. And it felt like one of those TV shows where a child
has been kidnapped and the police mount a search party and tell the parents
“go home and get some sleep, we’ll call you if we find anything.” Who can do
that? I knew that intellectually in our well diversified society there were people
who could fight the virus and people who couldn’t and I fell into the latter
category, but the idea of sitting home and doing nothing seemed impossible.
Before my grandmother died, she gave me her photo albums and I sat with
her and went through them. Folded into a page between images of long gone
relatives standing in front of new cars and old dogs, were a book of ration
coupons, half used, and a civil defense poster explaining what to do during
an air-raid, signed by their block captain and civil defense officer with instructions
that it must be posted in the home. I asked my grandmother about
WWII and she had no specific memories. She remembered recycling aluminum
from the backs of gum wrappers and a general sense of patriotism, but
not a single specific memory. It seemed sad that the spaces in between these
few photographs were empty. I started wondering about what would be left
after this, our very own very unusual time.
My first thought was to create an oral history of doctors and nurses on the
front lines to preserve their experiences, revelations, and day-to-day stories as
we moved together through this. At some point we will look back at this as an
important time, significant for a myriad of reasons, and we’ll want to know
what it was like at the tip of the spear as well as what it was like in quarantine,
rationing pasta and watching Netflix. We, as humans, have a seemingly
unquenchable thirst for stories about heroes. Hollywood spends a great deal
of time and effort recreating destruction, but we don’t seem to have the same
propensity to tell stories about people who build and people who hold back
chaos. This is a story about people. This is also a story about bearing witness.
The United States has a famously short memory, a phenomenon recognized
two centuries ago by De Toquiville, capitalized on in politics and entertainment,
and exploited successfully by foreign governments. The Pandemic of
1918 was almost completely forgotten within two years of its conclusion and
the concurrent war which took the lives of as many as twenty million people
slid rapidly from the public consciousness.
As I started photographing doctors and nurses in early April of 2020 the city
began to shut down in parts as though someone were in the basement of a
large building flipping circuit breakers. But some things stayed on. Water
kept coming from the faucets, the trash kept getting picked up, food kept
appearing on shelves, and the mail kept arriving at the door.
When most everything stops it becomes a lot easier to see what few people
are actually keeping us all alive. As I began to meet more essential workers
— delivery people, cashiers, plumbers, postal workers — I became more
cautious about using the word “heroes” because it can suggest a shifting of
responsibility. It’s easy in our minds to offer up the word hero in exchange for
the ethical malaise we’d otherwise feel about sending someone else into the
uncertain air of the grocery store to pick up our Wheat Chex cereal. There’s
a desire to view the people who were going to put on their armor and enter
into battle to protect us as people making a noble sacrifice: to those about to
die, we salute you! But I realized quickly that wasn’t necessarily the case. Some
people were indeed rushing forward to fight the virus, but other people were
out there on the field of battle because we left them there and to say “hero”
sounded like a shameful exchange. As though if we used that word then we
could let terrible things happen to people, assured in the belief that they had
been rewarded — by their heroism. Indeed, I heard a lot of push back from
nurses in the early days too and quickly abandoned that word into the dust
pile of “things we need to think about after this is all over”. Nikki, a nurse
who spent the pandemic in an ICU said this:
It became very easy for us to say that sanitation workers were heroes and
applaud them as they drove down the street without pausing to think if they
had a choice.
While nurses and doctors, and EMT’s to some extent, signed up for this
— they work in places where blood-born pathogens spread through needle
sticks or spray to the eyes and mouth and where people with infectious diseases
like influenza and tuberculosis are treated — a lot of people now on the
front lines didn’t get to make that decision and were never asked the questions
that we ask doctors and nurses and soldiers and sailors: are you willing
to risk your life and the lives of people you love for this job? Some people in the
thick of this are economic hostages who are at risk because they cannot skip
a rent payment or don’t have health insurance. And as jobs fold and people
lose their employer-provided healthcare, their immediate options to pay the
bills are a plethora of essential jobs that carry risk and offer no paid sick leave
and everything gets worse. Our country is being hit by a medical emergency,
to be sure, but that is sitting on top of an existing social emergency that has
stratified risk.
So do thank the doctors and nurses you see and clap for them in the evenings.
But be sure to tip your delivery person, thank your letter carrier, thank every
FedEx driver who walks past your front stoop, and put your mind to thinking
about how to make everyone’s lives better and more equitable, because
this is a story about both heroes and about inequality.
My grandparents came through the crucible of WWII forever altered, and
many people through 9/11, never able to find again the world as it was in
August, 2001. I imagine we all too will be changed. The life of 2019 won’t be
a place we go back to. It will only be a place that was. In years to come people
not yet born will find our faded collections of hand-sewn masks in trunks
and ask what we did and what it was like during this time. I’d like to be able
to tell them. I’d like to be able to say “Here are the stories of the people who
kept us alive.”
I photographed most people early in the morning on their way to work and
from a distance of at least 10 feet. The essays are edited down from conversations
with final corrections made by the subject.
Layers: Between you and the virus — Mask as
Metaphor
There are generally only three ways that coronavirus can enter your body —
through you eyes, nose or mouth and because of that Margaret was one of
the only people I photographed who I actually saw. Because at the time it was
new and novel I actually asked her if she’d bring a mask because I wanted to
both capture the strangeness of what we were going through and reinforce
the idea that what medical professionals were doing was dangerous work that
requires its own special armor against armies of invisible invaders. Due to
shortages of Personal Protective Equipment though Margaret didn’t actually
have a mask. The hospital gave her one which she had to keep at work in a
bag with her name on it. One of the things we talked about was that she’d
always been told that masks aren’t reusable, and now she was being told to
use the same one for a week or more. How safe was it? She didn’t know, nobody
knew a lot of things. At this point her hospital hadn’t gotten their first
COVID patient, but they were getting ready for it and Margaret volunteered
to take care of the first patients when they came in because she lived alone
and she figured she’d be less of a risk to others.
Margaret was the first, and last, person I photographed without the physical
barrier of a mask between us. As the pandemic proceeded, masks and the lack
of masks became an everyday topic of concern for everyone. When I went to
City Hall to photograph the Mayor my wife made me a mask out of a bandanna
and two hair ties and I was terrified of being in a building, despite the
fact that everybody was spaced so far apart.
When I started seeing them discarded on the ground, I thought
“I’ll photograph masks. That will be my therapy. I’ll photograph masks, but
only in the rain because somehow they look more interesting in the rain.” So
whenever it rained, I grabbed my camera and went out on a long, circuitous
route that passed by hospitals, nursing homes, and the public transportation
areas near them, all the places that I’d learned it might be possible to find a
discarded mask. I collaborated with a poet to make a collection of photos and
poems about life during COVID. And I realized that the thing that really
fascinated me about masks was not that they were hard to get, but that they
were the barrier between us and this attacker. And one day, looking down at
a mask in a puddle I realized that if they were working properly, there could
be a coronavirus trapped in that un-woven extruded material. That one of the
invisible enemy might be right there. Dead.
A few months after that, masks were everywhere, almost overnight. Eventually
surgical masks became the new mylar potato chip bag — discarded everywhere.
Typically surgical masks consist of three layers: a non woven fabric,
a melt-blown filter layer, and a soft non-woven fabric layer that goes next to
your skin. I started collecting cast off masks and printing photos through
their fabric layers. These layers halt some amount of airborne droplets and
aerosolized virus particles. I was fascinated by the idea that the light might
be passing through one or thousands of inactive virus collected in the folds.
I realized that I could print the photographs of essential workers through the
masks and it might be a portrait of a person and a ray of light imperceptibly
deflected by a coronavirus lodged in its fabric.
In the early days I noticed a class structure to masks, even among medical
professionals where many healthcare workers want but can’t get the most
effective n95 masks and workers in grocery stores are using cloth masks they
made at home, while the most exclusive hospital workers performing the
most dangerous tasks use PAPR, powered air purifying respirators, while
fashion companies around the world roll out ornate designer masks.
Whenever I start doing something, I start doing it obsessively and this also
happened with photographing masks. After a point it became difficult to
leave a discarded mask on the ground, especially one that had obviously been
in the elements for a while where they’d begin to merge with the environment
and take on the stained, textured aspect that made them more interesting to
print through. If I was traveling with someone, I’d make a mental note of its
location and return later with gloves and a bag. I let bags of masks sit in the
sun in the back yard for a week and then washed them in a bucket of soapy
water, hung them on a line and sprayed them with the hose to get rid of the
surface dirt — the leaves, cocoons, twigs, and other things that gather in
storm drains. When they were relatively clean and completely dry, I’d start
pulling them apart looking for interesting filters. These were photographed
with a macro lens at high resolution and then preserved in acid-free bags.
I noticed a lot of variation in the build quality of the masks, some came apart
with a few pulls, others resisted disassembly and still others wilted in the rain
and disintegrated like tissue paper.
Each of these masks represents a person, a story, a life and I always thought,
while I was handling them, about the person they protected. Who were they?
What was their life like? How had COVID touched them? They were the
shadows of the stories of COVID19. The masks had such a uniqueness to
them I began to think of them as portraits too — perhaps portraits of inactive
coronavirus but also portraits of people shown in the things they left
behind.
Our upstairs neighbor is an archaeologist and often we’ll find ourselves on
the front steps or in the back yard talking about his work and I’m fascinated
that, for the most part, we know a people by what they discard. “Midden”, in
fact, is the word archaeologists use for a dump — a pile of detritus, usually
accumulated over dozens, hundreds or even thousands of years. The layers
of a midden are called the stratigraphy and there you can see the layers of
civilization in their compressed trash and I realize that in a thousand years,
archaeologists are going to find a blue non-woven fabric layer separating the
time before from the time after like a thin line of icing in a wedding cake.
Archaeologists have words for that too: terminus ante quem means “the limit
before which” and terminus post quem, “limit after which” — the earliest
possible date for an event. These derive from the Latin “terminus” meaning
“boundary” and in the stratigraphy of the 21st century, that boundary of
surgical masks is going to peg things above or below it as being either before
or after the COVID-19 pandemic and grad students will write dissertations
about it, and each one of those masks they pull up in a bucket of dirt will
have belonged to a person, like one of us, who had a life in this time.
One of the things that I found fascinating about these masks is that this is
something that no human being was ever supposed to see, and if I hadn’t
ripped it apart and looked at it, this is a physical object that almost certainly
no human eye ever would have seen. And they were all so unique and, even
in their sameness, in their own way, beautiful. All the while wondering if any
of them had stopped a coronavirus from getting from one person to another.
So, in one of these photos, was a ray of light passing through this mask to
my camera also hitting a dead coronavirus? Was I photographing the enemy
somehow? I noticed that there was a huge disparity in the quality of masks.
Some resisted disassembly, others seemed to be made out of little more than
paper towels and rapidly disintegrated. I became like an obsessed collector,
getting excited when I saw a new variety, a new shape, a new material. All
the time, obsessing about photographing a coronavirus, I knew that there
was another piece to the story — and that was the people. I thought back to
my grandmother and I realized that in 40 years, kids are going to be rooting
through trunks in attacks and they’ll find all of our fancy fashion masks and
they’ll ask “What did you do during COVID?” And I wanted to have an answer.
So I started looking for people who were fighting this battle on behalf
of all of us.
After that photo of Margaret everybody had PPE and I realized that I had no
idea what these people looked like because they, or I, were behind masks. So
for every subsequent photo, I printed through the material of one of those
surgical masks. So possibly in this photo there’s Sara, and there’s a Coronavirus.
Some of the masks I printed through are more obvious than others. And
this was all happening concurrently, I wasn’t collecting masks for two weeks
and then shifting to front-line workers, I was actively pursuing both of these
at the same time because I think with a lot of artistic projects, you just start a
whole bunch of them and after a while some just bubble to the top as being
the ones that it feels right to work on. I’ve always felt that if you just pick one
thing you may find yourself six months into something that’s doomed but
you’re doggedly pushing forward because you’ve already invested so much in
it. In this case I felt like I was picking at this thing from two complimentary
ends.
Through all of this people told me things. They told me stuff they probably
didn’t tell other people. A lot of them told me things their families didn’t
want to hear about. Or that their colleagues already knew. I was worried that
I might be re-traumatizing people, but a lot of them said it felt good to have
a stranger to tell things to. I learned how difficult this job became. That it
was a job people loved, that had gotten incredibly, and increasingly difficult.
And I feel that photographers can do one of two things: You can tell your
own story, or you can help someone else tell theirs. And both of these are valid
choices, one’s not better than the other. But here, I just wanted to use the
reach that I had to make these voices louder, to take these things that nurses,
and doctors too, were telling me, a stranger, and share them. And in the first
couple of months I was talking to people who seemed to be at a breaking
point. And in hindsight, there was so much more breaking that was going to
happen, and, I think, a lot of that happened because people, “my Facebook
friends,” weren’t hearing these stories and they got tired of lockdown and they
started going to parties and they started hanging out with friends and it just
kept happening again. It was like I was talking to 40 Cassandra’s every few
weeks who were telling me exactly what was going to happen and nobody
was listening.
][
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to the people who helped make this possible,
not only the doctors and nurses, but influential people who believed in this
project from the beginning and were eager to help me share the stories of
those on the front lines: Mayor Jim Kenny, Linda Huss, Kelly Cofrancisco,
Deana Gamble, and the Philadelphia Streets Department.
1 From the
Project Gutenberg edition Plato’s Republic, Translated by Benjamin Jowett, quotes are from “Introduction and Analysis.”
