Archive for Life In The Time of Coronavirus

Concluding “D.C. Under Quarantine: A Visual Diary”

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on May 9, 2020 by johnbuckley100

All images Leica SL2, with the 24-90 or 16-35 Vario-Elmarit lenses

It was eight weeks ago yesterday that the partners at the Washington, D.C. firm in which I work told our team that, for the foreseeable future, we would conduct business from home. In the office lobby where we had assembled everyone — in contravention of social distancing rules we would all soon learn — people exhibited a combination of relief, fear and a little bit of excitement at the adventure ahead of us. I told people that we would be apart for “at least the next two weeks.” That seems almost funny now.

Yesterday, Mayor Bowser — proving to be far more concerned about the safety of her citizens than the man in the big white house on 18 acres in the city center — let us know our indefinite lockdown still has some time on the clock.

Keeping a city of 700,000 at home while a pandemic rages is a hard thing to do, especially as the calendar has moved from the late winter cold through Washington’s genuinely epic spring season. We’ve been good about social distancing, Mrs. Tulip Frenzy and I, but as early as March 18th, I began walking around the city — often at dawn or at sunset, after working from home — embarked on a photo project. My goal has been to capture D.C. under quarantine, but in a very specific way we will get to in a moment. Aside from the initial reportage cited above, I have updated this project here once. Today — perhaps fittingly, a blustery, cold day that seems like the clock has been reset to mid-March — I bring it to a conclusion.

The project I embarked on two months ago was to capture the weirdness and beauty of Washington under wraps during its most beautiful season. I probably would have used my Leica SL2 to capture the Tulip Frenzy, and after it, the Azalea Frenzy, but when in the city, as readers of this site know, I am partial to black & white photography — to street photography that reflects the sublime grit of urban life. Under the lockdown, I was, if not shut off from the streets — in which I’d have to keep far greater distance from other people than I’d like — then at least encouraged to stay home, to stay in my Northwest DC neighborhood. And to the extent I went to public spaces, the quadrant I kept in was the D.C. that tourists inhabit — the Mall, the Georgetown waterfront, the Kennedy Center. White D.C. Safe D.C. Perhaps not coincidentally, the city’s most picturesque parts.

Which led to this inversion of my life, and approach. The approach I take when living not in the city but out West — early morning and sunset landscapes — was grafted onto my experience here, and I began to shoot urban landscapes with an emphasis on how beautiful the environment is, flowers in bloom, people mostly absent. It was different and thrilling. At first.

I began looking at the city from new angles, in new ways. And as I posted images on Instagram (@tulip_frenzy), I learned that in the lockdown, many of my friends were spending more time on Insta than usual, and posting color pictures of our city in bloom was cheering people up. And so, for a while there, it seemed I had a purpose — which you need during a lockdown! I resigned myself to deviate from the kind of photography I typically do when at home in D.C., in part due tocircumstances, in part as a social service. Or such was the rationale. My non-work hours were given over to driving to the Mall or other locations and going on walks, camera in hand, in search of good light. The earlier posts linked to above capture that journey. This final collection shows how late April and May progressed.

For a while there, it rained a lot, and one night I went out to see what I could find. I started by going to Ben’s Chili Bowl, on a deserted U Street, the night that Congress voted to replenish funds for the Paycheck Protection Program. Ben’s, a D.C. institution that has brought people together in a racially divided city for 60 years, was reportedly in dire straits, having been shut out of the first round of federal funds. It seemed outrageous that Congress was appropriating trillions of dollars, and yet an institution like Ben’s was dying for lack of access to it.

To drive through D.C. streets on a rainy spring evening with virtually no one visible — pedestrian or motorist — was passing strange. The drive to Capitol Hill was eerie.

At the Capitol, a lone staffer emerged in the rain hours after the vote to fund the PPP (which, happily, as it turned out, was able to provide Ben’s a lifeline.)

On my way home that night, I drove near my office and saw a sight that made me pull over and jump out with my camera. A man who seemed to be having difficulty staying upright peddled a bike in wobbly loops in front of the closed Tiffany’s jewelry store on 10th Street. It was too alluring not to try capturing it, which imperfectly I did.

As time progressed, more and more people came out during the daylight hours. Wisconsin Avenue was far more crowded with cars each passing day. I would drive to pick up my salad from the SweetGreen, usually listening to reports on the radio about the hellish conditions in New York, where people were dying by the hundreds. The journey which in March had seemed like I was the only soul braving such adventures, now had actual traffic. In the evening, when I’d go out with camera in hand, people were exulting in the spring weather.

Of course they were; it was springtime in Washington, which is to say, springtime in America’s most beautiful city in that season. And they had been — all of us had been — cooped up for weeks.

And yet, as the federal response from the White House faltered until they just seemed to give up… and guidance on social distancing and wearing masks seemed to be contradicted every day… until that crescendo of derp in which the president urged us to shoot up Clorox, even in D.C., there were signs that people weren’t taking seriously what needed to be done.

And then came the flyover by the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds, a welcome entertainment and a lovely thanks to the medical workers, but catnip for luring people out in the kinds of crowds we weren’t supposed to be in.

While my photography is decidedly not aimed at finding the visual juxtapositions and humor that are hallmarks of artists like Elliot Erwitt, Pentti Samhallatti or Craig Semetko, perhaps my favorite image from the entire project is this one below, in which the bird clearly did not get the memo about which direction air traffic control was sending those lucky enough to have wings.

I continued going out, camera in hand, taking pictures of our city under glorious light and bizarre circumstances.

As time went on, though — and it became ever more clear that the lockdown wasn’t for a short spell, but would likely continue into summer — I began missing my beloved Leica Monochrom, and the ability to take pictures in black & white. Mentally, although perhaps not in practice, I began to rebel against the self-imposed prohibition against street photography, because by definition it meant being in contact with people. One night I went to the Key Bridge and took landscape photos up and down the river at sunset.

The moon was coming up over the bend in the Potomac in front of the Kennedy Center. And to the Northwest, the Potomac flowed under the spires of Georgetown University. It was breathtaking, honestly, crossing the bridge as traffic went by, a few hundred feet above the river, staring at the scene below.

A short while later, as I walked back up into Georgetown’s empty streets where I’d parked my car, I took a photo that reminded me of the kinds of pictures I missed taking.

Earlier that day, Peter Fetterman — the great L.A.-based gallerist who has been posting images from his collection since the lockdown began there — had emailed the black & white image Willy Ronis took in 1934 of Rue Muller à Montmartre. It was foggy and mysterious and it made me think of the Exorcist Steps, so I walked over to them just as that woman above was ascending. This seemed like the photography I should be doing.

It has been a strange couple of months, and a highlight has been capturing these urban landscapes in a city I love. But I’ve decided to end the project here, on a high note, and get back to taking photographs in black & white. I wish everyone good health as we get through the pandemic. I’m going to continue taking pictures, just not part of this formal project of capturing DC Under Quarantine, as I’ve called it. It’s fitting that the last picture posted here would be of the U.S. Capitol on a beautiful evening, as the first picture in this project was of the Washington Monument at dawn. A beautiful city. A strange set of circumstances. Please stay well.

The full gallery of John Buckley’s images documenting D.C. under the Covid-19 pandemic can be found here. His Instagram feed is found @tulip_frenzy

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Update To “D.C. Under Quarantine: A Visual Diary”

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on April 18, 2020 by johnbuckley100
All images Leica SL2, daily feed @tulip_frenzy on Instagram

In the second half of March, I began to visually document the Nation’s Capital under the soft quarantine imposed by our mayor after Covid-19 began to spread. It was, at first, a suggestion we stay home, and my office depopulated in advance of the more restrictive order that came a short time later. Mindful of safety, and taking precautions, I still went out, often early, sometimes at dusk, to try capturing D.C. in its prettiest season, and to document life under quarantine.

I became as highly attentive to weather forecasts and the times the sun would rise and set as my wife and I are when we’re out West, and color landscape photography in a mountain valley, not street photography in the city we live in most of the year, is the objective.

The city was, at is always is in spring, amazingly beautiful, as the tulip frenzy progressed to Easter. It was eery to go on walks and see virtually no one, the citizens of the capital city having gotten the message to stay home even as the White House flopped around in incompetence and indecision. I found I was oddly suited for the absence of direct human contact, and the conversion of my urban street photography into something akin to urban landscape photography.

On bright and sunny days, people would go out, but fewer of them, and with masks. Runners along the Mall seemed stunned that, in what typically is our city’s busiest tourist season, there was no one there.

I remembered, from college, seeing that 1950’s horror movie, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and it was like that. You could stand in the middle of the tourist corridors and see just the occasional bike rider.

I get a paycheck, and being at home was perfectly comfortable, but I found myself overwhelmed with sadness as the economy flatlined, and people suddenly lost work, and those essential employees had to risk their lives to go to work.

Do you see the guard above? She probably considered herself lucky to have work to go to, but I remember standing there for a long time, my head a jumble of emotional calculations, sad that she was in our city’s most beautiful museum without the usual run of schoolchildren there on Spring Break visits, happy that she seemed safe, with no one around her. It was a bewildering, emotional, upside down moment, typical of the world under the Coronavirus lockdown. Everything is upside down.

Just the birds were out, as in a typical spring morning. But there was nothing typical about this, and one had to look at things in a new, unfamiliar way.

And then came a magical few evenings when the Pink Moon rose, a super moon, and we rushed to capture it on an empty National Mall.

The moon itself was gorgeous, and as it lifted into the sky, it was so bright it was really hard to capture. It really did cast the sky in pink light. I remember standing there, amazed, and thinking of Nick Drake, whose album Pink Moon tugs at our heart, and when we got home, we learned that even as the moon had risen, John Prine had died of Coronavirus.

The next night, we went down to the Mall, again to try capturing the moon, and on our way, over Constitution Gardens, got a distant glimpse of the Lincoln Memorial in the Blue Hour, and everything was right in the world. We once again brought our tripod, but the pictures we took of the moon paled in comparison to one of the few pictures we’ve captured of what I would deem a street scene, as the bicyclists below on the left side of the image stayed still long enough for a two-second exposure to capture everything, the image I will keep for life as the best depiction of the unbelievable beauty of being in Washington during this horrible period.

I kept going out at dawn and dusk, though I felt my spirit flagging. It was hard to keep thinking of where I might want to position myself to take pictures. It seemed incredibly artificial to be capturing images of pristine, official, privileged DC and ignore all the sections of the city where people actually live. In brief forays into the city’s urban streets, however, I was pretty stunned to see people clustering, some with masks, many not, and it seemed far better to stay in my socially distant world, driving or walking to take pictures where people were few and far between.

Easter came, and the city bloomed, as it usually does at Easter time. But time began to hang heavily as we started our fifth week of working from home.

Walking with a camera in hand remained the essential psychological outlet, but the sense of unreality began to intensify. And all the while, walking from our home or car, after a day spent working, was a reminder of how many people were in absolute bewilderment of sudden joblessness, or, in New York, the horror of the pandemic raging all around them. D.C. officials kept talking about the future peak in cases, but in the city’s Northwest Quadrant, it all seemed far away.

The Earth still stood still, but our stomach churned and head jangled from the blasts of sheer insanity emanating just a short distance away in the White House briefing room. It was hard to reconcile this peaceful, gorgeous city with the unfathomable craziness of the President lashing out at governors fighting the pandemic, at the Supreme Court sending people out to vote in Wisconsin amidst a plague.

Ah, but by now the Azalea Frenzy had hit our backyard, and weather warmed, at least briefly.

We remembered how our documentation of D.C. under quarantine had begun under a cold March sunrise at the Lincoln Memorial, and by now, even as people kept their distance, things were warm, spring was here, and of course our spirits lifted. People were out on the Mall, but appropriately — we had masks on, for the most part, and there was enough space between us and the runners to be able to continue walking comfortably. How long this will go on, and what happens when the weather gets even warmer, we don’t know. For now, as our quarantine continues and news comes that at least New York is past its peak, spring continues, and we look up.

To be continued…

John Buckley’s daily feed of images on Instagram can be found @tulip_frenzy. For the full set of images, head over to our sister site, John Buckley in Black and White and Color.

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D.C. Under Quarantine: A Visual Diary

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , on March 28, 2020 by johnbuckley100
John Buckley’s Instagram is @tulip_frenzy; All images taken with the Leica SL2

I took my last black and white photograph before the soft quarantine began on March 9th. I actually went to a concert in a small club along the D.C. Wharf, because Wire — a favorite band for more than 40 years — are always worth it, and I was armed with hand sanitizer and instructions on social distancing. Still, though… my last outing, and what was I thinking?

Later that week, we announced to our office employees that we would work from home until the Coronavirus abated, or at least until the risks had diminished. A few days later, before sunrise, I went down to the Lincoln Memorial for MonumentHenge, that wonderful moment when the sun rises and shines directly on Lincoln’s face. It was dark when I parked my car. The guards were out in front of the State Department, but no one else was around, save for those dedicated workers, God bless ‘em, showing up before sunrise at the Federal Reserve.

The markets were in chaos, and people were beginning to die. But elsewhere, not here in this Washington, not yet. We were told to stay home, except surely you go out and walk in the morning, before sunrise, to take pictures. Washington, as always, was beautiful.

Later that same day, when teleworking, our new odd reality, had subsided, I returned to the cherry blossoms before the crowds arrived, as they did in force that weekend. There was a woman taking an iPhone photograph while she kneeled by the water, a mask on her face. It seemed emblematic of the moment.

Within days of taking that picture, the National Guard was shutting down access to the Mall, and those of us who live here were shamed, put in the same irresponsible category as college kid revelers on the beaches of Florida.

I kept going out — at sunrise, in the evenings — but carefully so, when people were distant. Photographs I posted on Instagram were, I was told, cheering my friends up, and I decided to keep at it, Leica SL2 in hand, shooting in color.

I’m going to keep doing this as often as I can, as we get through this terrible moment. There may be a time when I can’t go out, for a variety of reasons. Until then I intend — carefully — to amble along, camera in hand, a flaneur, an urban landscape photographer, intent on staying six feet or more from anyone I see. Robert Capa once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” He died taking pictures. I’ll keep my distance.

You can see the progression of time by the blossoms, and as I write this, the tulips are out. One day I saw a couple dancing outside of the Kennedy Center, and I completely understood what was going on: they needed to get out of the house. They weren’t the irresponsible who couldn’t keep their social distance. You can tell they dance together from their shoes.

It is an awful moment in the life of our planet, our country, and soon, no doubt, my beloved D.C. Think of this, then, as a visual diary of the way things were as the sun kept rising each morning, but the progression of the pandemic kept us away from work, and one another.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep the associated gallery up on johnbuckleyinblackandwhiteandcolor.com. I’ll probably stop posting these color pictures when we get the all-clear sign, if ever we do, that we can go back to work in an office. For now, enjoy these fossils of light and time, as Moriyama might call them. I hope they both brighten your day and serve as a visual diary of Washington, D.C. in the time of the Coronavirus. Consider this a work in progress…

To follow this visual journal, go to our sister site, John Buckley in Black and White and Color.

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