Photo documentary by Gregory Peterson, Foreword by Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University.
Mid-March, 2020. Gregory J. Peterson is on an early evening walk in his neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when the unthinkable happens. The 24-hour city shuts down to protect its citizens from an invisible, lethal novel coronavirus raging through it. Manhattan’s iconic public spaces are now devoid of people. The monumental Lincoln Center Plaza is emptied of opera and ballet fans. Sounds of skaters on ice and the bustle of tourists at Rockefeller Center’s world-famous skating rink are absent. Not a single soul can be seen going to mass on Easter Sunday as churches, including the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, are closed. Starkly silent, the city is stilled, as no one had ever seen it before.
Traveling by foot and bike to avoid contagion, Peterson embarked on a personal journey to document a momentous point in time in the city where he was born and raised. He took more than 400 photographs of over 200 locations in the city through the spring and summer of 2020 to capture its beauty when no one was there. He photographed landmarks that now looked almost surreal without people―the United Nations Secretariat with no traffic, visitors, or flags, 42nd Street in front of Grand Central Terminal without a person or even a car in sight, and storied neighborhoods famous for their shops, restaurants, and art galleries, now turned into enigmatic stage sets. New York: Stilled Life preserves this moment in time in 128 full color photographs.
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/New-York-Stilled-Life--Portrait-of-a-City-in-Lockdown-by-Gregory-J--Peterson---Goff-Books--January-2022.html?soid=1106396448260&aid=ls8xNaF1LCg
