Parking Lot Pandemic 19 (2020/2021)

In North America wearing a mask was definitely extraordinary. An unprecedented accessory, the mask incited a mass horror of change. It's as if masks should be confined to hospitals, labs, ambulances or the scenes of violent crime.  It was as if, like the coronavirus itself, the masks had escaped from contaminated places.  At first wearing a mask wasn’t perceived as a symbol of  dedication to other people’s safety, but logically the mask was an excellent idea. Logical compassionate people tolerated it for the sake of fellow citizens’ well-being.  After a while those of us who wore the mask ceased to find it creepy.  For people to whom free will could include deciding to wear a mask, the mask no longer evinced the lonely life of a germophobe.   
 
 
Jeanne Randolph
from Parking Lot Pandemic 
27 photographs 
Created in 2020 
Printed in 2021 
Inkjet on Epson Premium Luster paper 
Edition of 2
11 x 8 ¼ 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