I was just flicking through some selfies from the first couple of months of the pandemic by way of taking stock of my mindset then and now. This is me on the first of several trips from my faculty office with big loads of books on a hand truck being transported back home in anticipation of an imminent announcement that the campus was going to be completely closed over the summer of 2020 with no presumption of access to any building on campus. I didn’t want to be in a situation where I couldn’t get some material that I needed for my writing.
In the photo, I’m carrying some materials in a backpack that are from a long-ago research trip that I keep together just so I don’t lose track of them—I always feel especially vulnerable moving them. Takes me back to my dissertation work in Zimbabwe, when there was no Internet and photocopying there was beyond my means, so I left with a bag of notes that I clutched in my hands and resolved to give up only if my life was threatened, and maybe not even then.
You can, I think, see the feeling of worry and uncertainty in my face—a case where the consciousness of taking a picture didn’t really push me into a pose but where awareness of my feelings was what motivated me to take the picture.
Is the pandemic over? In terms of the disease still being around, people catching it, and some people still becoming gravely ill, no. In terms of it creating tremendous uncertainty at every level of institutional and community life, it’s over. In terms of it being in some sense unknown in some of its basic parameters as a disease, it’s over, even if there are still many things that need further research. Looking at these photos also reminded me of how much we didn’t know early on. Before public experts shifted to calling for masking, they were wary about masks; before they confirmed it was spreading by air from asymptomatic people. I more than masked up early on—I wore gloves, I wore safety glasses, I wore a hoodie, and I wore a respirator normally used for protecting against aerosolized paint. It was excessive but the information wasn’t clear in those early months.
There are things I now wish I had my own pictures of: empty streets, empty places, the strangeness of people in public staying away from one another and the strangeness at times of people ignoring that. I’m sure there is a photographic archive of that kind that we will all be looking at in the years to come; it has already been shown to us from time to time. Unfortunately I think the defining feelings—especially divisions—of the pandemic are not past but present. We don’t need to look at anything to remember them, as they are with us still.
I regret not going through with my idea for a series of photos of discarded masks on the ground. They were so sad looking. They were everywhere for the first two years of the pandemic.
This is a fantastic essay. I recall, I live with that protectiveness of the materials I recorded in my early research, though they will soon be available on line and searchable. But I think we need reminders of these moments. Today, walking dog through cemetery, she found the gate out and I had a deep memory of trying to open it without touching any part of it.