I am about to become a 2020 graduate of an MFA program in photography, and like every 2020 MFA graduate, like every 2020 graduate pretty much everywhere, I witnessed Covid-19 go through my last semester like a wrecking ball. Last residency, cancelled. Thesis exhibition, cancelled. Physical installation, forget about it. Graduate critique and thesis defense via Zoom. People critiquing my work by looking at jpegs, produced according to the conventions every 2020 MFA graduate must by now have committed to memory: 2000 pixels on the long side, 72 ppi, 01_LastName-FirstName.jpg, etc., etc. etc. Let’s be honest, taking everything into account—120,036 deaths in the United States and 40 million Americans unemployed as of this writing—this is small beer. It pales in significance to losing a loved one or a job. It pales in significance to the death of George Floyd. It pales in significance to the systemic racism that will, until it is finally eradicated, call into question the value of any art I or any 2020 MFA graduate makes that does not address itself to racial injustice. Nevertheless, it’s the particular room you are in that rocks when the world underneath it shifts. Art school, like everything else, came to a full and obliterating stop. But in the process, it taught me something important about my own work.
For about a year, I had been working on a project in which I photographed strangers during the morning commute in Grand Central Terminal. The work was rooted in the traditions of street photography and much influenced by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia’s Heads. I had been drawn to Grand Central because the light, particularly in the morning, is so extraordinary there. The idea for the work was inspired in part by a poem by Walt Whitman:
Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the
centre figure of all;
From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus
of gold-color'd light;
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head with-
out its nimbus of gold-color'd light;
From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman
it streams, effulgently flowing forever.
—Walt Whitman, “To You”
No head without its own nimbus of light, no individual who is not the protagonist of his or her own narrative. “The living presence and beauty of a glorious and luminous light has no enemies,” Emmet Gowin has written. “Our shortcomings forgotten; we are all for a moment its children.” That was what the light in Grand Central seemed to me to do when we walk through it, make us its children, and that was what I was trying to capture in my work there. And then the pandemic came.
Theorists like Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag have long ago pointed out how vexing photography’s relation to time can be. It has a kind of immediacy that is rooted in its function as an index, the fact that it points to something that left a trace of itself on a light sensitive medium. The problem is that while what the photograph captures may endure, our sense of what it means does not. A wall of photographs taken by someone else simulates a kind of dementia: we know these people and objects existed, but it is as if we cannot remember why they were photographed. And so, in the absence of that memory we supply our own, a kind of understanding, based on everything we know has happened since those photographs were taken. We look at a photograph of our mother taken thirty years ago, and while we may not remember the occasion, we know everything that has happened to her since. This is what Barthes meant when he famously wrote in Camera Lucida that photography is “prophecy in reverse: like Cassandra, but eyes fixed in the past.” Old photographs more often than not authenticate what we have lost, instantiating a space in time between what we know now and what we thought we knew then. Taking into account what we know about time—I looked so young then!—and what we know about mortality, photography’s narrative structure resolves itself into pre- and postlapsarian, before and after the fall, with the photograph usually supplying the “pre.”
These theoretical arguments always seemed convincing to me, but only in application to “older” work, with spans of years intervening between the present and when a photograph was actually taken. They could not possibly be relevant to my own work, to photographs I took a few months ago. The Covid-19 pandemic has taught me how wrong I was. My last session in Grand Central was on February 21, 2021, nine days before the first reported case of virus in New York City. Without a cloud in the sky to block the light reflected off nearby buildings and into the Main Concourse, conditions there were perfect. I photographed hundreds of New Yorkers on their way to work. On the train home I scrolled through the photographs and exulted in them. This is exactly what I was trying to capture: no head without its nimbus of gold-colored light. A month later, New York City had become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, if not the world. People were dying at a horrific rate. The city went into lockdown. People who did not lose their lives lost their livelihoods. And whatever I thought the photographs I took on February 21 meant, they could not possibly mean that any more. Their meaning now was generated by the questions they relentlessly put:
Did this person lose her job?
Did this person become ill?
Did this person lose a parent?
Did this person lose a business?
After looking at a photograph of his mother when she was a young child, Barthes shuddered over her death, “a catastrophe which has already occurred,” and concluded, “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.” Every photograph, by being rooted irrevocably in the past, even a very recent past, becomes an emblem of what , when it was taken, we didn’t know was waiting for us around the next corner. And so, in the midst of a pandemic, had mine become.