One Photographer's Reflections on Protests and the Pandemic

As part of Brooklyn Resists, we have invited local photographers, both amateur and professional, to contribute their work to the community-driven digital archive hosted by Urban Archive. Interested in submitting your own photographs, ephemera, audio recordings, or artwork? Click here to find out more about our community collecting project.

At the end of May 2020, the case of George Floyd unleashed an unprecedented series of protests all over the United States and beyond. In New York, people had been quarantined in their homes since the end of March, and to now join a Black Lives Matter march or rally provided people with a jolt of purpose, sense of community, motivation, social engagement I had not seen in the city before. To walk and chant in the streets for social change went on uninterrupted for weeks and months. The masks and social coverings that became mandatory over the course of the spring keep sending messages of hope and resistance. 

The closeness and sense of belonging I felt during the protests of 2020 was invaluable currency after months of physical and emotional isolation. I basked in the sense of connection - both mine with the crowd and the one I sensed among subjects. As we marched, we were all chanting, like a mantra, and step by step the people seemed to blend together, and I with them. 

As an immigrant and as a photographer it is precious, humbling and sublime, to have those moments of recognition in which I feel the different parts of myself integrate and at the same time I am able to honor other humans, commune in one meaningful cause - and go with the flow.

I photograph the street everyday, for over two decades now, the images from this series are part of a larger series of pandemic images. Some images from this time have been acquired by the Smithsonian Museum as part of the first set of multiple pandemic-related museum’s digital acquisitions, two Covid-19 related photographs are part of New York Responds. The First Six Months at the Museum of the City of New York through May 9 2021, one (May 10) mask was part of the #ICPconcerned group show, now online, and 25 images formed The City in Masks solo show at the General Consulate of Italy, which was on through November 11, 2021.

Francesca Magnani is a Brooklyn-based, Italian photographer, writer, teacher and translator. Born and raised in Padua, she arrived at CUNY as a Fulbright graduate student in 1997. Since then she has been telling in words and images the stories that move her while she chronicles at the same time her own life. Follow her on Instagram @magnanina and francescamagnani.com.