Yana Paskova - Photojournalist

My Covid-20

On the mind and body, both left so unguarded by a pandemic: an otherwise unremarkable angry white man pointed a gun at me at close range one December weekend. I suppose I was driving slightly too slowly -- in New York terms, the actual speed limit -- meandering in thought in front of him, which is exactly the opposite of how I'd pictured a road rage shoot-out. In that incredible moment, all I could do was clutch the most vulnerable spot of my chest and evoke a God I do not believe in; and as he drove away, scared but unscathed I had no words to recall. An image had returned to me instead -- this one -- taken after my pandemic birthday, in June. Just a few hours before sharing a bucolic hilltop with friends, a radiologist had surprised me with a report of an irregularly-shaped mass inside my right breast. As unlikely as it was for it to be *that kind of irregularly-shaped mass* in my 30s, WebMD of course did not wholeheartedly agree.  

A sharp probe proved it benign, but it didn't have to be -- and it made me think about how often I choose to see and then unsee the things and people who turn out to be anything but. It is halcyon of me to believe that until last breath, if you eat healthfully, love well, labor for your convictions, and tell the truth, you collect payback in the same currency. But there are regular masses and irregular, and the second sometimes mutate and conceal inside the softest, most attractive tissue, in silence but unhesitating to pull the trigger for their own pleasure or expansion. Which might sound dark, but against their violent relief I can now clearly see everything that isn't. I finally understand that if I start to believe in the dark, I will also start to believe in its most precious opposite.  

In short: in the year of 2020, I am very happy to have managed to evade more than one covert killer. And this is how. 

  • On the vulnerability of mind and body, both so unguarded during this pandemic: an otherwise unremarkable little white angry man pointed a gun at me at close range one December weekend. I suppose I was driving slightly too slowly -- in New York terms, the actual speed limit -- meandering in thought in front of him, which is exactly the opposite of how I'd pictured a road rage shoot-out. In that incredible moment, all I could do was clutch the most vulnerable spot of my chest and evoke a God I do not believe in; and as he drove away, scared but unscathed I had no words to recall. An image had returned to me instead -- this one -- taken after my pandemic birthday, in June. Just a few hours before sharing a bucolic hilltop with friends, a radiologist had surprised me with a report of an irregularly-shaped mass inside my right breast. As unlikely as it was for it to be *that kind of irregularly-shaped mass* in my 30s, WebMD of course did not wholeheartedly agree. A sharp probe proved it benign, but it didn't have to be -- and it made me think about how often I choose to see and then unsee the things and people who turn out to be anything but. It is halcyon of me to believe that until last breath, if you eat healthfully, love well, labor for your convictions, and tell the truth, you collect payback in the same currency. But there are regular masses and irregular, and the second sometimes mutate and conceal inside the softest, most attractive tissue, in silence but unhesitating to pull the trigger for their own pleasure or expansion. Which might sound dark, but against their violent relief I can now clearly see everything that isn't. I finally understand that if I start to believe in the dark, I will also start to believe in its most precious opposite. In short: in the year of 2020, I am very happy to have managed to evade more than one covert killer.
  • Protective equipment (April 2020.)
  • A lone shopping cart endures in Home Depot's parking lot in Brooklyn, NY in March of 2020, as the pandemic shuts down life in New York City as its early epicenter.
  • In the first of many citywide quarantine days, I asked my favorite pizzeria to poke holes in the delivery box to release condensation that would otherwise take the crisp -- and therefore, the New York -- out of my favorite pizza. This is the pattern they chose, and my face made a corresponding shape (April 2020.)
  • Gazing at the same pizza box, its eye holes revealing another pandemic friend -- the TV remote -- that had earlier made me smile, started to feel like a burden. We are all so anxious and so tired (April 2020.)
  • One of the last images I took on photo assignment before the pandemic locked down New York and took at least half of my assigned work with it, for the rest of the year. This is a broken Family Dollar store sign, propped up on a wall behind the store in The Villages, Florida, ahead of the upcoming Democratic primary on March 14, 2020.
  • A lifeline for my iPhone, itself a bit banged up -- this artificial window into a suddenly shrunken world (April 2020, Brooklyn, NY.)
  • To cope with a city suddenly bereft of all that makes it New York, I've leaned, as usual, on the magical symbiosis between letters and images -- on words that make me want to bring pictures into existence, and on the words pictures themselves write for me. As the threat of Covid-19 reaches omnipotence, I've felt most drawn to certain emotions that rhyme in books: currently, Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment (for its numbing description of {quote}absence of sense,{quote} maddened within four walls, or by a city already emptied of feeling,) and Albert Camus' The Plague (beyond eponymy, for the portents humanity is forever cursed to ignore, and then, what follows: how to manage the absurd.) This is because I find my therapy in confronting and understanding (and then, releasing) the unpleasant. (April 2020, Brooklyn, NY.)
  • In a world that has paused its humans, humans reclaim the asphalt. A skateboarder soars above the now uncharacteristically quiet avenue below me in Brooklyn, NY in April of 2020.
  • A couple soothes the wounds of lockdown by sunbathing on a Brooklyn rooftop on a May 2020 evening.
  • Trapped within steel and glass we are. (August 2020, in Brooklyn.)
  • (Diptych, L-R) Gloves tied to dried roses, naturally flattened by traffic on Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn + a broken liberty torch amongst shattered storefront glass in Times Square, during heavy protesting against police brutality and social inequality in New York, June of 2020.
  • Love in the Time of Corona, July 14, 2020 in Brooklyn, New York: two people on a balcony during Brooklyn quarantine.
  • In wait: a pandemic threatens to quiet what makes us so casually human, via loss of self, or loss of others. (April 2020, Brooklyn.)
  • My neighbors hold a socially-distant street barbecue just below, on the sidewalk of a wide Brooklyn avenue, in August 2020, as Covid-19 ravages the United Sates.
  • The sun sets over a quarantined New York City. I've heard yellow and orange rarely are popular colors. Some say this is because their luminous spectrum drains the eye of energy, while others associate a mustard hue with warning or disease. (March 2020, Brooklyn, NY.)
  • Tree on golden fire, like all else around it. (April 2020, Brooklyn.)
  • A crown crawls over art masking a paused construction site. (September 2020, Brooklyn.)
  • Garden of Eden, Covid Era (through a Brooklyn window, June 2020.)
  • And it continues -- {quote}A Little Madness in the Spring.{quote} (In thought of Emily Dickinson's isolation while quarantined, May 2020.) If all else fails, turn to poetry.
  • INTRO
  • My Covid-20
  • Dark Year (2020)
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