Photographer Page

Peter van Agtmael

BRINGING DIGNITY TO THE DEAD 05.21, Queens, NY Francisco James, resident funeral director at Leo F. Kearns Funeral Home, checks some of the bodies held in a refrigerated container. In an eight-week surge of COVID-19 deaths in New York last spring, the funeral home served 350 families; typically it handles about 75 deaths during a two-month period.

New York, USA: "I took this photo in the early days of the stay-at-home order in New York," says photographer Peter Van Agtmael. "I was trying to reckon with the eeriness of an empty city, with the knowledge that the worst was about to come."

New York, USA: A grocery store worker in Brooklyn lays in a supply of paper towels during the early days of the pandemic.

"After a few weeks of covering corona in New York, I decided I wanted to ride things out with family in the D.C. suburbs," says photographer Peter van Agtmael. "My parents are in their 70s, so first there was the necessity to self-quarantine for two weeks at my folks' place on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. For the first few days I was joined by my close friend Christian Hansen, who was en route to his own family in Kentucky. We kept six feet apart with one exception: He had to help me dig out a large glass shard that got stuck in my foot."