PANDEMIC DIARIES
Online ZOOM Lecture
With Lynn Johnson & John Stanmeyer
Part of the proceeds will be donated to Ecumenical Hunger Program of East Palo Alto, CA.
ABOUT THIS EVENT
Join us for a conversation with National Geographic photographers Lynn Johnson and John Stanmeyer as they present their two parallel experiences of the current crisis: one on the frontline, in rural America, the other in the isolation of home.
Lynn Johnson has been documenting the life inside a small hospital on Whidbey Island, WA. While we are witnessing the ability of the coronavirus to destroy individual lives and the fabric of our global communities at an alarming rate, there is another critical story playing out in the rural areas of America.
Covid-19 is also killing the rural health centers and hospitals that serve millions of people across the country. It is projected that a quarter of rural hospitals will be forced to close due to the extreme financial and social pressures created by the Covid-19 crisis. This is a project about the future—subtle and profound ways that the coronavirus is threatening life in rural America. Welcome to Whidbey Island.
John Stanmeyer has been sheltering in place in his home in Great Barrington, MA and has been documenting his life, in his project ’24 Windows’. Every person on earth today is experiencing an impact that will last for decades and generations to come. Much of what is occurring is internal. At times a cleansing of the spirit, other moments in worry of the future.
With most of humanity sequestered in their homes in self-quarantine or mandatory quarantine, our outer world becomes viewed from the inner being of our existence through windows. Mystical portals to a world we no longer can safely enter.
How is this affecting us? What will be the long-term psychological and physical impact?
24 Windows represents a view of our world through the twenty-three windows of my home, a 120-year-old house left in disrepair by its previous inhabitants. The home, serving as neglect we’ve done to ourselves, our earth, the outer world holding promise for a better future.
I began sharing this project on Instagram at the end of the day that no longer has names. An outpouring from thousands of people I’ve never met who found comfort in these visual and written tomes has been extraordinary.
As important online news is for information of an invisible killer racing across our planet, we also need hope. Moments of beauty and kindness, within ourselves as a means to give balance during the most critical moments of our existence – within darkness, there still is light. 24 Windows is a narrative of photographs, videos and words that lifts and brings hope. A story that connects and belongs to all of us.