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Alumnus George Etheredge Photographs COVID-19 Pandemic for "Rolling Stone" Magazine

Frontline and Front-Page Work

By UNC Asheville

June 12^th, 2020

What does a pandemic look like?

That was the question set before alumnus George Etheredge by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine. Etheredge, who graduated in 2016, works as a freelance photographer in New York City, and has had work appear frequently in The New York Times, along with publications like TIME, Bloomberg, The Guardian, and many others. Rolling Stone hired Etheredge to contribute photographs of New York as part of a broad visual story on various communities across the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So Etheredge went out into the streets. There he found, and photographed, long lines of masked customers in Brooklyn waiting outside a supermarket, corner-store owners and fast-food employees shielded behind their counters by large plastic sheets, a busy personal protective equipment (PPE) warehouse floor filled with employees racing to make face shields. While many photographs capture eerily empty streets and sidewalks, Etheredge decided to focus on where people were, instead of where they were not.

“I was more interested in photographing the people that were still having to go out into the world, and having to interact with others, and go to the store, deliver food,” Etheredge said.

“The whole pandemic has turned into this harsh metaphor for failures within the way our society is structured. Who was being affected by this was the question I was interested in addressing while making photographs."

After the visual story was published, Etheredge received another assignment from the director of creative content for Rolling Stone, this time to shoot the cover photo. The assignment was to take a candid portrait of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at one of his press conferences in Albany. But there was a hitch in the plan.

“We asked for access for a more formal portrait, but it was a hard no from them,” Etheredge said. “It was really tough because it’s a lot of pressure, and the setting wasn’t great. He’s kind of in this weirdly lit dark room.”

But Etheredge was up for the challenge. “Fifty percent of my job is problem solving. I’m always put in these situations where something isn’t perfect, and I just have to make it work,” he said.

Etheredge was able to produce a black and white portrait that not only looked like it was taken under ideal conditions, but conveyed the nuanced emotions of a leader working in times of great struggle.

“I wanted it to feel monumental, and I also wanted to convey a sense of uncertainty, because of this whole situation,” Etheredge explained. “I wanted to convey both this sense of power and the sense of vulnerability, and not knowing where this whole situation is going to take us. I wanted it to feel human. I hope to bring humanity into my portraits.”

The cover of Rolling Stone, Andrew Cuomo, photographed in Albany, New York, on April 3rd, 2020 by George Etheredge.

Learning how to problem solve, and how to tell a complicated story with a photo—or sometimes letting the photo tell the story and learning how to get out of its way—is something Etheredge began as an undergraduate at UNC Asheville under the guidance of Carrie Tomberlin, art lecturer, and Eric Tomberlin, associate professor of art.

“You’re out, you’re shooting, you’re collecting photos, you have to take a step back from the photos and think about, ‘what am I doing here?’ And as you start to collect photos, you’re learning what you’re really trying to say. I think it’s about letting the work speak to you rather than you telling the work what to do,” Etheredge said. “That’s one of the big lessons that I learned while at UNCA in my photo program.”

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