"It felt like the city was yours. But now I have the feeling that it is no longer so. Everyone took it back, ”says photographer Dina Litovsky Fortune.
Litovsky spent three months photographing New York City while ordering. Now that the city is in phase 2 of reopening, the world that saw and created it is disappearing.
Litovsky's photographs are usually overlaid with busy social interactions that make them meaningful in their design. But when she walked through the city in the early stages of the pandemic and went from the East Village to Midtown Manhattan, she was disoriented by the lack of the usual chaos in space. Litovsky has been a New Yorker for 25 years and says she has never seen or felt the city like this.
"It was confusing to be in such a beautiful room and at the same time to recognize the reason for its emptiness," says Litovsky.
Instead of focusing on the action of the pandemic that photojournalists were constantly reporting on, she was drawn to the cinematic and hypnotic state of her city. She was looking for extreme colors that had once escaped her because they were lost in the chaos of everyday life. The bright colors in her pictures illuminate what the city was before the pandemic, and she described the bright rooms as a consistent element of her work to “defy expectations, overcome dark times”.
Litovsky wanted to capture the disoriented state of the city and between moments took pictures of people whom she described as "hypnotic". She says: “All familiar things have lost their function. Parks were no longer there to be enjoyed, surveillance cameras were not monitoring anything, etc.
"I captured a very specific world that was alienating and scary but kept disappearing before my eyes as we approached the reopening of the first phase."
Scroll down to see more pictures of Dina Litovsky's "Dark City". Check out her Instagram here.
Dina Litovsky – Redux
Dina Litovsky – Redux
Dina Litovsky – Redux
Dina Litovsky – Redux
More Corona virus coverage from capital::
- Why black owned companies were hit hardest by the pandemic
- This was the most out of print product on websites in May
- George Floyd protests that coronavirus face masks face challenges
- The continuing history of health inequalities for black Americans
- Reading e-books is booming during the coronavirus pandemic
