48 Hours in America
From Anchorage to Miami Beach, 13 photographers document fear and isolation as the crisis explodes across the country
From Anchorage to Miami Beach, 13 photographers document two days of life in a time of fear and isolation.
When march began we could leave our houses. We could go to work, vote, attend church, or buy groceries without thinking much about any of it. But by March 30th, more than 2,400 people were dead, some 150,000 were known to be infected, roughly 10 million had lost their jobs, and about 80 percent of the population was restricted to their homes. That same day, Rolling Stone photographers were fanned out across the U.S., from Miami to Detroit, L.A. to Anchorage, Alaska, capturing a snapshot of the country over the course of 48 hours, from a Sunday morning to a Monday night, as more and more communities were pulled into the virus’s riptide.
Even that was still just the beginning. “If we do things together well — almost perfectly — we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities,” Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus task-force coordinator, said on March 30th. More than 500 people would die of complications from the virus on that day alone. In New York, the epicenter of the crisis, the death toll surpassed 1,000 as the state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, pleaded with health care workers around the nation: “Please come help us.” In Los Angeles, farmers markets were suspended. In Texas, inmates sued for soap and hand sanitizer. In Washington, D.C., the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms canceled tours of the Capitol. And in remote Wyoming, where there was still not yet a single recorded fatality, things proceeded almost as normal. “It doesn’t feel like a cultural shift in our little world of Chugwater,” rancher Jeremy Westerman told photographer Benjamin Rasmussen.
In New Orleans, a pastor was arrested for continuing to hold services. In Seattle, a nurse told photographer Grant Hindley that part of her job these days was improvising family visits through patients’ phones: “A patient is not necessarily alert, but the family member can at least see them. I’d like to think that’s comforting, but it’s emotional.” In New York, “the city has ground to a halt,” says photographer Natalie Keyssar, who captured Amazon delivery drivers still on the job. “We’re able to be sequestered in our comfortable apartments thanks to these workers.”
For photographer Brittany Greeson, who relies on developing an intimacy with her subjects, the hardest part was staying away from them. “I have to keep my distance for their safety,” she explains. But even as Greeson chronicled the devastation the virus wrought on her hometown of Detroit, she found hope in a conversation she had with a teenager behind a mask. “He was just talking about the things he wants to go on to do. He was into art and was asking about my camera,” she says. “He still has hopes and dreams. He’s not thinking of this as the end — he’s just waiting for it to be over so he can move on with his life.”
TESSA STUART