Among the many extraordinary challenges posed by 2020 were a few that were peculiar to photographers. When the pandemic hit, journalists who write for a living could conduct much of their reporting remotely, by phone or over Zoom, but photographers documenting the ravages of COVID-19 had to go to the action—or at least within six feet of it. Philip Montgomery was the first photographer to venture out on assignment for The New Yorker when the virus overtook New York City in March. Donning an N95 mask and food-service gloves, he caught scenes of the city just as it was shuddering to a halt: customers eating a final meal in restaurants about to close their doors; anxious shoppers pushing carts past barren grocery shelves; eerily empty subway cars and airport halls; health-care workers in hazmat suits. At the time, such images looked brand-new, like dispatches from an alien world. Even the careful spacing-out of pedestrians on the city’s normally busy streets was a visual shock, an arrangement that, as Adam Gopnik wrote in an essay accompanying the images, seemed to “contradict the very concept of the city.”
Sending photographers into the streets is one thing; sending them into crowded COVID-19 wards is another. In April, to capture the crisis inside New York City’s overburdened hospitals, the magazine’s photo department enlisted Karen Cunningham, an intensive-care nurse with a background in photography. Cunningham secured permission to bring her camera to her own workplace, at Lenox Hill Hospital, and in the course of two twelve-hour shifts she followed another nurse, her friend Cady Chaplin, and their colleagues in the I.C.U. She captured patients receiving oxygen and being intubated, a doctor holding a patient’s hand or performing a lung ultrasound, but also the lonely moments after work, when Chaplin would shed her P.P.E. in the hospital locker room and commute home through a deserted city.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
In June, city streets were packed again as a historic protest movement erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police, in Minneapolis. Isaac Scott, a twenty-nine-year-old art student in Philadelphia, documented the protests there. The coronavirus was a safety concern—Scott wore a mask at all times—but so were the police and their riot gear. “I was teargassed twice,” Scott said. He captured scenes of chaos, and fire, but one of his most powerful images is of complete stillness: protesters lying down on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the length of time that the police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck.
When possible, photographers did find ways to do their work at a remove. Parks and gardens and back yards became makeshift open-air portrait studios; Ethan Hawke’s wife, Ryan Shawhughes, became a de-facto photo assistant, with the photographer Nikola Tamindzic directing her, over video call, on how to set up a shoot outside the couple’s home. For a Profile of the musician Phoebe Bridgers, Matt Grubb’s only physically present subject was his own computer monitor—Bridgers appeared on the screen via video call, and Grubb kept the monitor visible in the final frame. The actor Daveed Diggs was social distancing from his collaborators in the noise-rap trio Clipping, but Jeff Minton got the band “together” by having Diggs hold life-size cardboard cutouts of the other members.
Such shoots made concessions to our new, restricted reality in 2020, but they also located surprising forms of artistry within the constraints. The New Yorker normally sends a photographer out each week to shoot the restaurant featured in our Tables for Two column. This year, photographers like Haruka Sakaguchi instead captured the cabin-fever experience of dining in the time of COVID-19. Sakaguchi shot a spread of takeout containers on her own nightstand. The bed beside it was gray and unmade, but the food in the containers was colorful, a hint of pleasure, and beauty, amid the rumpled mess.
2020 in Review
- The top twenty-five New Yorker stories.
- The funniest New Yorker cartoons, as chosen by our Instagram followers.
- Helen Rosner on the best cookbooks.
- Doreen St. Félix selects the best TV shows.
- Richard Brody lists his top thirty-six movies.
- Ian Crouch recounts the best jokes of the year.
- Sheldon Pearce on the albums that helped him navigate a lost plague year.
- Sarah Larson picks the best podcasts.
- New Yorker writers on the best books they read this year.
