Covid Diary

COVID DIARY is one photographer’s tale of processing the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of her camera. This unique book, one part diary and one part art exhibit allows a glimpse into Beth Galton’s life, thoughts, and art process as New York City weathered the storm of the global pandemic.

While the news was everywhere and overwhelming at times, Beth found both comfort and heartbreak in it. Walking away from her well-honed skills as a commercial photographer, she began a process of creating images that would speak to her anxiety, to the uncertainty of the time, and to the trajectory of how this crisis was handled. Compelled to find the humanity in the myriad charts and graphs that reported cases, deaths, and recoveries, Beth reached for symbols of life to balance the data. Botanical matter is scattered through the photographs, metaphor- ically and hopefully interwoven with jarring data, and ephemera from this period.

“Like everyone, I struggled with the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic – how it spread and wreaked havoc around the globe. In March of 2020, my world in NYC became my apartment. I brought a camera and some stands home from my photo studio, and constructed a small set next to a window.” So begins the story of COVID DIARY, one tale in the connected, isolated, unique, com- mon, and interwoven tales we all have to tell about the year that the pandemic stopped us in our tracks.

With an engaging essay by author Joan Duncan Oliver, COVID DIARY promises to be both document and talisman from a time and place planted forever in our collective memory.