Masked NYC: Witness to Our Time

On March 10, 2020, COVID-19 knocked me out. After 25 days of solitary quarantine, including days of labored breathing, I recovered, yearning to remedy the helplessness I felt while trapped inside my bedroom. Amidst the pandemic, and our country’s long-overdue reckoning with racism, I am engaged in an ongoing portrait project with over a thousand New Yorkers, all of whom have chosen to wear masks to protect one another, and who agreed to be photographed masked. Masked NYC is my effort to share the resilience, diversity, and dignity I have witnessed in my fellow New Yorkers. I created these portraits with permission, using a telephoto lens to remain socially distanced. I am deeply grateful for the moments my fellow New Yorkers have shared with me, expressing so much with their eyes, as our faces have been covered–moments of vulnerability, grief, humor, joy. My hope is that we will continue to strive for justice, health, and empathy toward one another moving forward–and that we may daily seek to see, respect, and celebrate one another’s radiance. Three-minute unlisted film compilation of Masked NYC: https://youtu.be/OpiLARqJM_4 AJ Stetson–MaskedNYC: Empathy as an Act of Imagination: https://youtu.be/DlUTClXnoao