In
The New York Times Magazine on April 23, Gabrielle Hamilton writes on the
events and repercussions, including emotional, financial and staffing, surrounding
her decision to shut down her twenty-year-old Manhattan restaurant, Prine, mere
hours before New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a city-wide Covid-19 shutdown.
I have been shuttered
before. With no help from the government, Prune has survived 9/11, the
blackout, Hurricane Sandy, the recession, months of a city water-main
replacement, online reservations systems — you still have to call us on the
telephone, and we still use a pencil and paper to take reservations! We’ve
survived the tyranny of convenience culture and the invasion of Caviar,
Seamless and Grubhub. So I’m going to let the restaurant sleep, like the beauty
she is, shallow breathing, dormant. Bills unpaid. And see what she looks like
when she wakes up — so well rested, young all over again, in a city that may no
longer recognize her, want her or need her.
And
still, there is talk of sleep. I remember the blackout. August 14, 2003, a
power outage that took out parts of Ontario as well as wide swaths the
Northeastern and Midwestern United States. Buffalo, Toronto, Ottawa, New York
City. I made my way to an ex-girlfriend’s condo across the provincial bridge,
given Quebec still had power. It took us an hour to find a restaurant that hadn’t
a line-up equally long. And yet, there was something remarkable about standing,
post-dusk, on Somerset Street West at the O-Train bridge, from within a capital
city set solely to natural light.
A
statistic floats by that says that some sixty percent of businesses in Toronto would
not survive if the shutdown lasts three months or more. There is talk of re-opening,
although carefully. There has already been those who have pointed out that if
you are to complain that the shut-downs should remain in place, you should first
clarify whether or not you still have employment, and access to income. Where are
we now? Forty-two days since our lock-down officially began. Since I turned
fifty. Since Gabrielle Hamilton shuttered the gates.
As
writer Bailey Cohen Vera (@BaileyC213) writes on Twitter: “I write a single
email and it becomes tomorrow.”
Beware,
as someone else writes, the memory of proximity to living things. In Canadian
Art, Michèle Pearson Clarke writes on “Isolation Portraits,” of
photographers taking portraits of their friends in isolation, akin to Stephen Brockwell’s photography project. To introduce her interview with photographer Alyssa
Bistonath, Clarke writes: “But the doorstep portrait is not new. As Didier
Aubert notes in a 2009 Visual Studies article, traditionally such images
have unambiguous things to say about access, intrusion and the white, liberal,
middle-class gaze—all issues which are deeply embedded in the documentary approach. Though
Aubert was mostly writing about projects that sought to document poverty and
rural life, these current isolation portraits traffic in the same transformation
of private family life into a constructed public performance for a larger
audience. The dynamics differ though: in these threshold quarantine spaces, we
see not people asserting agency by restricting access to some other intimate
visual truth of their lives, but people seeking momentary respite from the
overwhelming reconstitution of time and space that makes up life under pandemic
conditions. Access has been otherwise revoked, and intrusion appears quite
welcome.” Bistonath responds, “But for me, the essential element is capturing
intimate portraits of my friends while maintaining the distance necessary to keep
us safe.” The photographs acknowledge the shift in purpose and perspective, and
the world changing in real time. The portraits are intimate, but as close as is
possible, at least for the time being. But for how long?
No comments:
Post a Comment