Maybe you’re someone who keeps a diary, a shoebox of old postcards, or a closet of family photo albums. Or maybe you never bothered much with that kind of memorabilia. Who’s going to sort through it? When?
The unsentimental are right about one thing: In normal times, future historians probably really wouldn’t care about what you had for breakfast, or saw on the way to work, on any particular day. But that changed in 2020, and so did the instinct to document. In a pandemic that touched virtually every person and aspect of life on Earth, the ordinary was imbued with world-historical significance, inspiring an outburst of archival projects to capture how regular people lived through an unprecedented year.
Universities, libraries, and local historians on at least four continents are leading many such memory-preservation efforts. Some are managed by revered institutions, while others are scrappier, intimate. In the former camp is the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which has crowdsourced more than 1,700 photographs of American Covid experiences from Flickr users since September. The crosscut of local detail and personal fragments show the nation’s battle against the virus, and frequently itself. Here is a church filled with cardboard headshots of parishioners who would normally fill the pews. There are the snapshots of storefront signs insisting that masks are required, and of protesters who insist that they aren’t. “Please be patient, this is our first pandemic,” reads a sign in front of a socially distanced farmer’s market captured in Fairbanks, Alaska.
“Before this, I don’t think a lot of people would expect that a national institution would be interested in aspects of mundanity,” said Adam Silvia, a Library photography curator who is managing the project, which is set to continue for years after the pandemic ends. “One of the benefits of this terrible crisis is that people are seeing how their everyday lives fit into a national story.”
In truth, the Library has always done this, Silvia said. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Farm Security Administration funded a photographic archive that, employing now-iconic photographers like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, deeply influenced how lawmakers and the public understood the hardships of rural poverty. And its collections are full of images and documents that reveal how everyday Americans lived through countless world-changing events, including the 1918 influenza pandemic, the most recent public health crisis that is comparable in scale. Recent acquisitions include new works by Camilo J. Vergara, a photographer known for documenting urban change, depicting the outer boroughs of New York City transformed by face masks and tented test sites billowing in the wind.