I took a break from social media for lent from February until the beginning of April in 2020. When I began posting again on Instagram on April 9th, we were already several weeks into the Coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home orders in New Jersey, where I was living, and New York where I was working.
I found myself, as an essential worker, in Manhattan five overnights a week. I was completely startled by the vast emptiness in what was typically a sea of humanity, commerce, traffic and chaos.
I began documenting what I was seeing in a series of black and white photographs. They are meant to communicate, in the simplest terms, the disorienting, dark, uncertain, jarring, mysterious and difficult time.
Billy Power
