Businesses big and small start as dreams. For every Jeff Bezos, who quit his job in finance to start Amazon, there are many more like Hector Hsu, who while studying for a doctorate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened Very Excellent, a Chinese restaurant in Bristol, New Hampshire. John Tully captured that lakeside town in April, just as it became apparent that the pandemic would take an almost unimaginable toll on people’s livelihoods.
As the virus spread, New York Times photographers captured the way people and companies learned to adapt. Tom Jamieson went on board a plane to show cargo strapped in where passengers once plugged in earphones and sipped beers on the way to their vacations. In Bernal Heights, a neighborhood in San Francisco, Cayce Clifford showed us a sale at Bernal Bakery, a pop-up started in a one-bedroom apartment by two unemployed restaurant workers, Ryan Stagg and Daniella Banchero.
Cindy Richter and her daughter, Scout Kasak, pick up baked goods on May 3, 2020, from The Bernal Bakery, a project started by Ryan Stagg and Daniella Banchero from their home in the Bernal Heights section of San Francisco.
There was an eeriness to much of what we saw in 2020 — and the physical distance this year between subject and photographer added to that feeling. You can see that in how Joseph Haeberle captured Forrest VanTuyl, a musician in Enterprise, Oregon, silhouetted with a horse for a photo essay on the impact of the virus on rural communities in October.
Forrest VanTuyl, a musician, with his two horses near his home in Enterprise, Ore., on March 29, 2020. VanTuyl was on tour with his girlfriend when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Joseph Rushmore’s image of socially distanced people waiting in a large hall for help with their unemployment benefit claims is a reminder that in times of trouble, you can feel alone even if you are with many others facing similar futures.
Throughout the year, we became accustomed to seeing empty spaces and forgotten buildings. In March, Haruka Sakaguchi toured boarded-up storefronts of luxury brands in New York City that had accepted the inevitable: Window shopping was over for the time being.
And a photograph by Eve Edelheit of an empty parking lot at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Orlando, Florida, almost requires no caption at all.
The parking lot of the Metrocenter Mall in Glendale, Ariz., Dec. 12, 2020.
Photography always entails an element of trust between a photographer and the subject. But for these images something else came into play: risk. Risk of catching the virus. Risk that from a distance, we might miss the nuance of a story. Instead, we saw a mixture of worry, doubt and livelihoods on the precipice of collapse. We saw resilience, even hope, suggesting that all was not lost.
Among the many things that changed because of virus-induced lockdowns and restrictions, the change in the way we shop was perhaps the most visible. In Manhattan, New York, this spring, where the cobbled streets of SoHo came to a standstill, a number of elegant luxury boutiques, including Fendi, Celine and Chanel, did not just shut storefronts; they had them boarded up with vast sheets of plywood.
A staggering 6.6 million people applied for unemployment benefits in one week at the end of March as the coronavirus outbreak ravaged nearly every corner of the U.S. economy. Previously, the most unemployment filings ever recorded in one week was 695,000 in 1982. The pandemic left nearly 10 million Americans out of work over just two weeks, a toll far surpassing the darkest times of the last recession.