The motorcycle diary: Photos of NYC in the pandemic era
By Wong Maye-E, Enric Marti
With the onset of the coronavirus epidemic, global enterprise staffers Maye-E Wong, photographer/editor, and Enric Marti, deputy director of photography – both relatively recent transplants to New York – found themselves in a city that had come to a sudden, disorienting standstill, faced with the challenge of photographing the absence of life in a city normally teeming with it.
Marti saw many potential photographs from his motorcycle, but he couldn’t make them because he was driving. Maye-E, who had spent years working in highly controlled situations in North Korea, was used to shooting out the window or on the fly. So they teamed up, working in sync to create a shared vision of the city under lockdown.
“He would pause and point, and she would already have seen the shot,” Ted Anthony wrote in the accompanying text.
A man smokes a cigarette while waiting to cross a street in the Brooklyn borough of New York, March 25, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A family wearing face masks waits to cross the street in the Brooklyn borough of New York, March 29, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A food cart vendor pushes his cart down an empty street near nearly deserted Times Square in New York, March 15, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A man waits at a crosswalk in the Brooklyn borough of New York, March 24, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A worker wearing gloves and a face mask carries his deliveries from a truck in the Brooklyn borough of New York, March 24, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A shaft of light illuminates Park Ave., virtually free of traffic leading towards Grand Central Station, March 15, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
People cross the street in the Queens borough of New York, March 31, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A woman with a face mask walks past a mural in the Brooklyn borough of New York, March 27, 2020 – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
The Manhattan skyline is shrouded in low hanging clouds with the piers of Brooklyn Bridge Park in the foreground in the Brooklyn borough of New York, March 29, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A man sits on the ledge of a freeway in the Queens borough of New York, April 2, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A man gazes out of a window of a restaurant as he adjusts potted plants in New York, March 25, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
An ambulance turns the corner beneath the Flushing Ave. subway station, photographed from the back of a motorcycle in the Brooklyn borough of New York, March 25, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
Two police officers stand on a street corner to encourage social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic in New York, March 25, 2020. A poster reads: “Don’t be afraid of anyone.” – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
A cyclist delivering food stops at an intersection in the East Village neighborhood of New York, March 26, 2020. Many restaurants in New York City have converted to delivery and take-out orders only, as people are encouraged to stay home. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
The headlights of a few vehicles dot highways and overpasses in the Brooklyn borough of New York, March 21, 2020. – AP Photo / Wong Maye-E
They made more than a dozen trips over three weeks through Manhattan,Brooklyn,Queens and the Bronx. Photo editor Patrick Sison shot video and photos of the pair on the the bike,and digital producer Nat Castañeda,with the help Peter Hamlin’s illustrations, put together a video on the project.
Always in motion,they photographed a city gone to ground. The “drive by” photographs are raw,sometimes crooked and largely un-cropped. They capture ghostly pedestrians,seemingly post-apocalyptic vacant streets and shrouds of fog. The enemy is unseen – an invisible virus – but the threat of it appears in many eyes.
In one particularly haunting picture,a shirtless man is seen sitting on the ledge of a highway overpass,looking as though he might jump to his death. “He is on the edges and that’s how a lot of people feel,” Maye-E explains. The choice is to “push on or give up.”
