Collected Item: “An Empty Bridge”
Give your story a title.
An Empty Bridge
What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?
Photograph, uploaded by @cmarunucci on twitter, March 18th 2020.
Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.
This is a picture of the Oakland Bridge in the Bay Area, California, while completely empty due to the initial Covid-19 lockdown. This bridge normally has thousands and thousands of people crossing it on any given day, and at any given moment it will typically be packed with commuters. In the photo, it's almost completely empty. This uncanny image was the first thing that made me, living in a city on the opposite side of the country, realize just how serious the virus would be. At this point in time, most of my friends and family still believed we would be going back to school within the month of March. It was unimaginable that we would still be dealing with the pandemic in August, when I am writing this, and that we probably will be dealing with this for the foreseeable future. The response to this pandemic was quite obviously botched by the US and its institutions that are supposed to protect us, and by the end of this hundreds of thousands of people will be dead as a result. I fear a lot of people in the future will blame this tragedy on everyday people's failure to lockdown, and I think this image serves as an essential reminder that when we were first told to lock down, the American people locked down.
Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?
#Bridge,#Oakland,#BayArea,#SanFran,#Empty,#Lockdown#Uncanny#Surreal
Enter a URL associated with this object, if relevant.
https://twitter.com/cmarinucci/status/1240813613134123008
Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)
Carlos Avila Gonzalez (photographer)
Give this story a date.
2020-03-18