COVID New York: Five ICP Alumni

International Center of Photography, New York, 2020

Five alumni of the School at the International Center of Photography, New York, were commissioned to document their experience of the Covid-19 pandemic throughout the month of April, 2020. Gaia Squarci, Jeenah Moon, Yuki Iwamura, Sarah Blesener, and Jeff Mermelstein.  I worked with the five to help shape their work for an exhibition at the ICP’s gallery space.

Each photographer’s experience was different, and each made a distinctive approach. The results include reportage, image-text storytelling, autobiography, fiction, and street photography. The restrictions under which they worked were severe, but restrictions often motivate image makers to be resourceful, to find new means of expression. Breaking with expectations of themselves and the medium, they experimented in pursuit of visual strategies to shed important light upon what the people of the city endured that month.