Witnessing Pandemic New York, With an Ear to the Past

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/insider/new-york-city-pictures-pandemic.html

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The silence of Yankee Stadium was profound.

I was there in mid-May to photograph symbols of baseball where none was being played. When I peered through the stadium gates, though, I could imagine the sounds of a stadium packed with fans and, for a moment, feel as if I were there for an afternoon game.

Months later and a borough over, I sat with my camera in Citi Field, nearly empty save for a few hundred cutouts of fans, listening to piped-in crowd sounds as the Mets played their season opener.

As a staff photographer for The New York Times, I’ve been privileged to witness and capture a New York in the last five months that few others have seen during the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve published many of those photographs in a visual column called “New York Shuttered.”

That work has also led to a new photo essay, “The New York City of Our Imagination,” which aims to contrast the stillness of those images with the noisiness of the city that we all remember. The project, which appears in print as a special section on Saturday, also features words by the Times reporter Dan Barry, who so eloquently wrote, “We are living in the echo.”

And the online version contains an extra layer: ambient audio clips from pre-pandemic New York — bars, street life, park scenes and yes, baseball stadiums.

The project originated during a brainstorming session with Jeffrey Furticella, a Metro photo editor, who in early May told me about eight audio tracks produced by the New York Public Library and Mother New York in a collaborative album, “Missing Sounds of New York.” Mr. Furticella wondered, was there some way we could photograph them?

We used the recordings as a starting point, then broadened as we scouted for photo possibilities. The poetry of New York is serendipity. The only way to capture it is to just get out there.

At the time, New York City was barely coming out of its darkest days of the pandemic. I set about the city looking for life in a place that had been reduced to empty streets and grim reminders of a virus that was killing New Yorkers by the hundreds every day. What became the project’s title, “The New York City of Our Imagination,” was a mantra.

(Whenever I work in the field, I wear a mask diligently and distance as much as possible for my safety and the safety of those I am covering.)

In the Bronx, I photographed vendors at the Hub, one of the most vibrant corners of the city. During trips from city landmarks in Manhattan to places like a taxi depot in Queens, I drove side streets instead of main drags. On one such day in SoHo, I came across a teenage couple celebrating a surprise in-person visit with a kiss.

I also remember marveling at an empty Grand Central Terminal and an empty Times Square in March. As weeks and months passed, though, visiting these places became crushingly sad — a constant reminder of all we had lost.

It was important that our visual edit reflected that scope. What made our final cut had to capture the vitality of New York, but with a subtext that hinted at what has changed.

In the project’s presentation, which the deputy Metro editor Meghan Louttit and the graphics/multimedia editor Rebecca Lieberman were crucial in developing, it was important that the pairings of imagery and audio not be too on the nose. They needed to converge at times, but anything more became distracting.

As spring turned to summer, I watched the city start to open back up, slowly. One of the first indicators was the return of traffic. Then came people in parks — graduations, birthdays, weddings. And thousands took to the streets to protest racial injustice. Each new phase was a welcomed surprise and an opportunity to reinterpret our new reality. Though life has still not returned fully to the streets of New York the way it was, what has returned has done so in its own unique way.

Watching the tableau of kite flying, Zumba classes and birthday parties in an early-evening Sunset Park was therapeutic. Witnessing the unbridled joy of neighbors coming together for a nightly dance party in Clinton Hill in June was the first moment in months when I thought: “Damn you, New York. You still got it.”

We had been through so much together.