I was not blogging in public in 2020, but as the year went on I started to collect images and put them in draft folders. My first folder collected a few images from the weeks before New York City closed.

Feb 28

Had just pitched an animated TV show in LA, which got picked up and were celebrating with friends. Nobody was talking about Covid yet, but there were people from China at the airport wearing masks. I remember sitting with them on an airpot shuttle and worrying. The virus was in the ether, but we weren’t really thinking about it yet. 

March 1 the first case of Covid was found in NY. We were hanging out with family.

March 7 A state of emergency was declared in NY. We were still out and about doing things. Someone in the office lost his sense of smell and started feeling sick. At that point that symptom was unknown. One of my kids was in a darkroom photography class. On the 9th it was abruptly cancelled.

By March 12 the office was empty and New York was shutting down. Signs urging distancing started to appear around the city.

I was still in denial, but within a few days everyone had retreated.

It had started. 

At first, those of us who didn’t work in hospitals treated Covid like a weather disaster—let’s spend a few days inside, hang out with friends on zoom, and start some projects. 

But the numbers of people dying kept exploding.

The emptiness started to weigh on us all. We wandered through the vacant city not really knowing what to do feeling helpless.

When the morgue at the local hospital overflowed, they put a makeshift trailer morgue on 7th Avenue in Brooklyn. All over, memorials to the dead started to pop up.