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As chief visual journalist at the Mountain View Voice, my coverage of the pandemic took a turning point in January 2021. With vaccinations against COVID-19 starting to be administered, knowing that the vulnerable people I was photographing were now protected from the deadly virus felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
I had spent most of the previous year worrying that I could catch, carry and spread the virus without knowing it.
While I no longer methodically sanitized my camera equipment and showered and changed my clothes at the end of each work day, I continued double-masking wherever I went, and the majority of my photo shoots stayed outdoors.
By the spring, I had gotten my two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which gave me access to spaces and situations I hadn’t been in for over a year. And in May, I photographed hundreds of Mountain View and Los Altos high school seniors graduating at PayPal Park in San Jose.
In the second half of the year, after California reopened, my coverage started reflecting a community that was joyously, yet cautiously adapting. I captured athletes in a class at Title Boxing Club; masks were optional. In the fall, I photographed local artists performing at Red Rock Coffee’s in-person open mic night, returning after going virtual for 19 months, ever since the pandemic began. Some of my coverage even diverged from the pandemic-related news cycle. In July, I scaled the sides of local reservoirs with a telephoto lens and a drone to photograph the dire local drought conditions.
Things aren’t back to the way they were, obviously, and it feels like the “new normal” (excuse the overused phrase) may actually be upon us. We’re living in a world where there is a constant threat of new COVID-19 variants, such as omicron, but we’ve adapted to it and are able to do many of the things we did pre-pandemic.
These images illustrate how our community has come back together over the last 12 months to celebrate, learn, protest, support and create. Take a look.
