Among the many extraordinary challenges posed by 2020 were a few that were peculiar to photographers. When the pandemic hit, journalists who write for a living could conduct much of their reporting remotely, by phone or over Zoom, but photographers documenting the ravages of covid-19 had to go to the action—or at least within six feet of it. Philip Montgomery was the first photographer to venture out on assignment for The New Yorker when the virus overtook New York City in March. Donning an N95 mask and food-service gloves, he caught scenes of the city just as it was shuddering to a halt: customers eating a final meal in restaurants about to close their doors; anxious shoppers pushing carts past barren grocery shelves; eerily empty subway cars and airport halls; health-care workers in hazmat suits. At the time, such images looked brand-new, like dispatches from an alien world. Even the careful spacing-out of pedestrians on the city’s normally busy streets was a visual shock, an arrangement that, as Adam Gopnik wrote in an essay accompanying the images, seemed to “contradict the very concept of the city.”
