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  2020-04-20

  Experiencing Covid in West Philadelphia

  As lock down and social-distancing mandates were initiated in the spring of 2020, I was living in a tiny apartment in West Philadelphia. At the time, I was finishing my dissertation, which is a historical account about the ways in which another pandemic, HIV/AIDS, impacted the lives of children born with the disease, their families, and the healthcare workers that cared for them. Given that my entire life – work and personal – was crammed into a roughly 400 square foot apartment, I began taking long walks through the area of West Philly where I lived. These walks were mostly meant to help my mental health – sometimes they worked, other times they did not – and to relieve my cabin fever. From roughly March through June of 2020, I began taking photos of pandemic-related things that appeared on my walks. Save for my photo of the empty Target pharmacy shelves, the pictures – along with my journal entries and a small collection of pandemic-related ephemera – were an effort to document how the pandemic impacted my small part of the world. I also took them as a way to help me remember this era-defining event.