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.”
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.
“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 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.”