Parking Lot Pandemic 16 (2020/2021)

Supposedly the cloud of coronavirus would succumb to gravity. Two people coughing at each other could be assured that the cloud of coronavirus would land on the sidewalk or a patch of earth and die.
 
The coronavirus presumably would not die from impact. Having dropped onto a hard surface from a height of one to two meters, It is unlikely something so tiny is subject to impact. The question of whether a moist coronavirus could work its evil on dry cement was not generally explored. It is easy to imagine that there are germs or minuscule insects on the sidewalk, possibly vulnerable to a viral attack. The effect of an attack on a germ or minuscule insect is a matter for entomologists or bacteriologists. For practical purposes a viral attack on, for instance a bug, would not matter to humans fearing for their own lives. 
 
 
Jeanne Randolph
from Parking Lot Pandemic 
27 photographs 
Created in 2020 
Printed in 2021 
Inkjet on Epson Premium Luster paper 
Edition of 2
8 ¼ x 11 inches
 
“The Exchange District in Winnipeg, where all the grand warehouses, factories and national banks were established in the early 1900s, is also a district of parking lots. Ordinarily some lots would be more popular than others, but when public life closed down during the pandemic, every parking lot in The Exchange District was empty. The bistros and cocktail lounges that were more home than my home was, were empty. Their interiors were darkened by massive curtains pulled across massive windows. And next door or half a block over, there would be a parking lot with not a single car. Parking lots were unexpectedly on display. Without cars they looked raw, as if the hide of the city had been stripped off. I remember walking across King Street to look closely at a lot, and when I beheld the huge jagged potholes, gouged out gravel, crumbling, split uneven ground I laughed out loud. There’s a pandemic.
 
But there never had been time or energy to flatten and smooth these wilderness surfaces, especially ones that will be hidden under car bodies when everything is normal again. Standing on the King Street sidewalk, the phrase “car bodies” mingled in my mind with “human bodies.” At that moment my imagination filled the empty parking lots with the poetry of the pandemic. Every possible emotion the pandemic heightened, every version of death, of near misses and of escape that poetry provides.” — Jeanne Randolph