Lockdown Around the World | National Geographic
It was just a little bit of like a calm before the storm. People were waiting for something very bad to occur. Sydney, Australia, is a very vibrant city. It is usually bustling. Seeing it so stark is one of those things that you would expect to see from one of those apocalypse movies.
As a photographer going about and doing a lot of daily jobs all around Sydney, you could be a very good transmitter of this virus. You had to change the way you learned about the job: gloves, mask, not touching people, social distancing, and wiping down camera gear. The economic impacts have been massive, but certainly the mindset of the population now is we can see the success that has come from the mentality change, and people are still in a mood to come out of this successfully.
It was really surreal. I kept thinking, how is this real? How can I be standing here without being disturbed or jostled? India's lockdown is one of the strictest in the world. Parks are closed, you're not allowed to go for walks, there's no public transport, no trains, no flights. Some neighborhoods have even prohibited deliveries and food takeout, even though the government has allowed that.
It's especially hard for lower-income workers to access food and shelter at this time. The lockdown certainly feels necessary because the virus could spread so rapidly in a city like Delhi because of how densely populated it is and how much activity goes on outside. But balancing it with making sure people don't go hungry and that their other health conditions are attended to is also critical.
It felt like there was this enormity of this moment for these iconic spaces to be left to a standstill, that like just something really terrible must have happened. That felt really, really sad. While I was shooting in the empty streets of downtown, I found that the connection to the strangers who I met—who were mostly essential workers—was much more intimate and sincere than it usually is.
But all the people I met: security guards, doorknobs, a doctor, a taxi driver, felt that everyone is being especially kind and gentle and sensitive to each other's stress, and I was really surprised and moved by that softness. Johannesburg is one of the most unequal cities in the world. During the lockdown, this inequality is put into very sharp relief.
Some neighborhoods have quiet, tree-lined streets with huge houses and high walls, and these neighborhoods are like ghost towns. But then there are many neighborhoods in the city that are really crowded, lots of areas where people can't stay indoors and do social distancing. This lockdown has shown how very precarious and uncomfortable home is for so many South Africans.
Some of these sites, like the Rug Brigade of the Holocaust Memorial, are normally crowded with tourists, and in my day-to-day life in normal times, that often is my second thought. I may actually try to avoid these areas because there's only so many tourists walking around, and it's very, very crowded. So, work on this assignment was interesting because the city felt like a Sunday early morning.
Everything was empty, and there were not many people out. There was kind of an eerie feeling. I think if this lockdown continues a lot longer, it will be definitely more challenging for us as a business, but also a follow-up of other businesses. Aluminum, like many needs, requires people to get together in order to work.
But what gives me hope is this: ethnicity has gone through love, and as always when you walk in Midtown and there's nobody, when you're going through Times Square and there's nobody, it throws you off a little bit. There's something that just doesn’t feel right.
Doing this assignment was very interesting because it gave me a chance to see New York that I've never seen before. The places that I shot are very famous places in New York City, and they're usually extremely crowded. All of them have street vendors, people walking up and down, loud trucks and cars, and it's very intense. It's very energetic.
But this time around, it was surprising to see how empty and how quiet it was. All in all, we're still kind of lucky in the sense that we can still move, we can still walk around, we can still go to the park. My friends and family in Italy are stuck in their homes. I can't wait to go back to the New York that I know—crowded, loud, and sometimes annoying, but also full of life.