Coronavirus: NatGeo photographers capture their worlds on pause

“My instinctive response to this is to find beauty in what surrounds me, by rediscovering my house and its poetry through photography and video,” says Milanese photographer Camilla Ferrari, who hasn’t left home since March 9. “I believe this forced process of slowing down will soon reveal how our behaviour has affected both the Earth and other humans. I’m trying to keep my mindset as positive as possible by reading, researching, meditating, and taking pictures.”

“On the first morning of self-quarantine, an unexpected blossom of light appeared on the wall in my partner’s apartment near Gothenburg, Sweden,” says photographer Acacia Johnson. ”Since starting our self-quarantine, I've found myself making photographs in the way that I did when I first picked up a camera as a teenager—searching for quiet magic in the everyday. In this time of uncertainty, it’s comforting to recognise the beauty in the small details all around us.”

“I actually see a silver lining to this crisis, which is that the whole world has come to a standstill,” says photographer Maggie Steber. “I’m using the gift of time to work on an ongoing project: I collect things from my garden, and have been watching the activities of lizards, bees, and squirrels. Today I saw a lizard showdown and broke up a fight! As worried as I am about the world, work, and life in general, this hiatus has also given me calmness.”

“Yesterday, my 82-year-old neighbour, Barbara, asked me to help set up a Zoom call on her iPad for her pilates class,” says photographer Ismail Ferdous. “She has been taking these classes with the same instructor for over three decades, and this was the first time Barbara had to participate remotely from her Manhattan apartment. Needing weights, she improvised and used [cans of] beans.”

“Already traditional photographers are challenged by how they capture the virtual world and everything that happens there. With coronavirus, I find myself also physically challenged,” says Tehran photographer Newsha Tavakolian, who broke her own quarantine to shoot haunting images of her hometown. “I’m committed to telling stories, but often they are the stories of others. This time what is happening is also happening to me.”

“With uncertainty comes a deeper awareness, not only for the shifting parabolic curves of this pandemic, but for the minutiae of daily life,” says photographer Nichole Sobecki. “The neighbourhood hawks, the warmth of the ground beneath us, quiet moments together. I’ve spent much of the past decade watching as hotels and airports and rushed meals blurred into one line of continuous motion. Now, with all travel delayed, time stretches out. I worry about what things will look like in my adopted home of Kenya—vibrant, yet vastly unequal—when the full force of this storm hits.”

For Greece-based photographer Loulou D’Aki (who is Swedish), spending time in Japan during coronavirus was a mixed bag. “Being far from both my homes, the adopted one and the homeland, was emotionally quite taxing,” she says. “I would follow the news and talk to friends and family, but in times of crisis like this, it felt wrong to be on my own on the other side of the world. Japan had a very different way of handling a situation like this. When I arrived, they had already figured out how to keep the pandemic at bay. This made me feel calm on the one hand, but quite lonely on the other.” D’Aki shot this image of masked women in Tokyo’s Jimbocho neighbourhood before returning to Sweden in late March.

“It is beautiful to slow down and spend so much time together as a family, but it can also drive us nuts,” says Ivan Kashinsky, who, with his photographer wife, Karla Gachet, has been spending many hours with their young children. “Our saviour has been nature. We take a long evening walk every day, and the trails seem to heal our minds. Photography is another form of therapy. I have been documenting our lives with my phone as we head into the unknown.”

”In Italy, the situation is sad and out of control, and I’m in the epicentre of the storm, Lombardy,” says photographer Luca Locatelli. ”The most vulnerable are the elderly, like my mother, an 82-year-old stubborn, tough, and lovely Italian grandma. She can’t understand this invisible tsunami that doesn’t let anyone have contact with her. It’s sad for me to not let her see her nephews, not hug her, and to try to convince her to wear a mask. I bring her food and my camera. After 10 days, it has become our ritual and reality.”

“A photographer is a photographer 24 hours a day all the year, not only while on assignment,” says Paolo Verzone, who captured the makeshift home gym he’s set up on his Barcelona rooftop. ”I feel perfectly comfortable documenting life from my kitchen or from a 215-square-foot room in quarantine. It’s the same as if I’m in the middle of a desert with a magical view.”

”I just arrived home from out of state, and it’s hard not to worry that I could be carrying a sleeping virus,” says photographer Corey Arnold. “I’m hoping to turn my new inability to travel into a positive with more time spent with my family. My partner, Aly Nicklas, and I live in Portland with our six-week-old son, Wolfgang. I normally fly out of state at least twice a month for work, but now, quarantined in my home, I find myself documenting a health and economic crisis looming in the not-so-distant future.”

”I love this view out of my window,” says British-Malaysian photographer Ian Teh. ”But it doesn’t sound as peaceful as it looks: The hum of traffic from a nearby highway permeates. [But during] our national lockdown, birds chirp outside or there is just silence. Both are a reminder of this grave situation. We only go out for food or medication. Jobs and projects have vanished or are on hold. I feel fortunate that I can share this time with my partner at home. I’ve tried to see this as an opportunity to do things I sometimes struggle to find time for, from connecting with faraway friends and family on video chat to cooking and meditation.”

”Here in the south of Bahia there is no structure for this crisis. People continue to live their normal lives, going to the beach, respecting the distance sometimes,” says photographer Luisa Dörr. ”[Bahians] are a very tough people, raised in the forest, working their whole lives under harsh conditions. They say that a virus is not how they die. Also they are very religious, and most of them strongly believe that God will protect them.”

“I worry about the future of my job as a freelance photographer who depends on travel and assignments abroad,” says Istanbul-based Rena Effendi. “I have traveled to about 20 countries in the past year for work, and I am somewhat enjoying the downtime at home with my daughter. The neighbourhood I live in, Gihangir, is actually not so bad to be quarantined in. There are plenty of small grocery stores and everything you need is within walking distance.”