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."