VISUAL CITY
The novel coronavirus hit cities like a neutron bomb: Our buildings, streets, and public spaces remained intact, but the human beings pretty much disappeared. This eerie tableau has faded a bit as people emerge, masked, gloved, and distanced, back into the world.
Thank goodness for street photography and its chronicling of the still-shocking emptiness and the subsequent green shoots appearing across the city. Gene X. Hwang, a co-founder of Orange Photography, an SF-based photo and video agency, was at one point exploring a career in photojournalism. But working his way up in a midsize metro wasn’t appealing. “Since I grew up in small towns” in the Midwest and South, he says, “I always knew I wanted to live in a more urban environment.” San Francisco beckoned (as it has for so many).
When the economy was going gangbusters, Orange had plenty of gigs, from conferences to parties and public relations. Then, of course, everything changed. Hwang wasn’t about to lock down the camera, though. As a matter of fact, it was the day the shelter in place order came down in March that he started shooting the Coronavirus Life series, an impromptu project of visual journalism of our changing times.
“I mostly was using [Coronavirus Life] to keep me on my toes, since my corporate photography work wound down, and also to document the current moment,” Hwang recalls. “I didn’t think it would last as long as it has, so the perspective I’ve taken has meandered,” encompassing the early shuttering, the Black Lives Matter and social justice protests, and scenes from his part of town in particular, the Mission district.
“I do carry my camera with me when I leave the house and try to keep an eye out for interesting things while I am riding around town,” he says. “Right now I like the juxtaposition of ‘regular’ life within the frame of the pandemic. Many of us are normalized to seeing people in masks and parklets with folks hanging out.”
Spring and summer in 2020 have been anything but normal, and we’re really fortunate that Gene X. Hwang never gave up on photojournalism. Let’s hope that looking at Coronavirus Life helps us hang in there for San Francisco.
All images by Gene X. Hwang. Follow him on Twitter @x and on Instagram @genex. You can also support him on Patreon.
