On a warm night last spring, I gathered with friends outside at a bar in Brooklyn. Vaccines had arrived, summer was coming, and we felt giddy with what felt like a new “afterwardness”. Someone in the group asked: “So, what is everyone’s most quintessential COVID-19 story?” 

I paused, unsure of how to answer. To be sure, so many things had happened in my life —in all of our lives—since the pandemic took hold in early 2020. I was among the fortunate: healthy, housed, and gainfully employed, with plenty of opportunity to safely see loved ones. But like much of the rest of the world, I had also felt intense loneliness, deep sadness, and fear. Neighbors left town, lovers lost jobs, friends struggled to collect unemployment. Births happened, but so did deaths, and then more deaths. Surely, the pandemic had left me with something I could say was quintessential, or at the very least, had left me with a good story to tell. Hadn’t it?

Later that night, I started scrolling back through my iPhone’s photo library. I shot sparingly on my digital SLR camera that year, so nearly all of the images from 2020 had been snapped on my phone: things on the street, scenes in passing, or selfies taken out of boredom. It was only looking at them as a whole that I started to see what many of these images were capturing (or rather, not capturing): emptiness, absence, idleness. Scenes that felt abandoned, some with blurred subjects or fragments of friends. I found myself looking at a chronicle of a year turned inside-out, and the closest thing to a story that I could offer.

Comprised of 100 images taken over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, current / events probes moments of absence and of loss in a meditation on being dislodged from “normal.” Taken together, the images form a sort of mosaic that betrays what seems to have been my real subject all along: the grace that sits beside despair, the stillness watching the storm, the hope that floats past ruin, undeterred. It is the vital current that runs through our days: sometimes pushing us forward, sometimes dragging us behind, yet always holding at our center. The seam that binds a year.

The title of this project borrows from a sign on Long Island, Maine, where in summer children spend hours diving off the docks in the wake of ferries. On the wharf, above a bench piled with their discarded shoes, shirts, and beach bags, a community bulletin board sign reads “Current Events”. The jubilant swimmers far from view, the heap of personal belongings feels eerie, coldly reminiscent of the millions of people who have died from the coronavirus.

As another year of the pandemic comes to a end, we are still waiting for the real “afterwardness”. Meanwhile, we swim in the wake of all we have lost, telling each other our stories from a year like no other.

In closing, an excerpt of some reflections that emerged while spending time curating the images for current / events:

Death still sits beside me

At least one of us still breathing 

Lungs heavy with what feels like History 

Disguised as current events.

— Hannah Dunphy, December 2021