So Much Was Lost

Once I noticed the gloves on the ground, I couldn’t stop seeing them. In the early days of the pandemic, I would find dozens of them on walks. My family laughed at how long it took for us to go places on foot, as I stopped to photograph them on every block, slowing our progress to a crawl. I was attracted to their humanity and their gestures; they were animate, the energy of the wearer embedded within them. Only the embodied ones were captured by my camera.  Months later, as we stopped washing our groceries, and were able to touch one another again, the gloves lessened in frequency, but did not disappear.  

Typologies of the discarded, simultaneously alluring and abject, fascinate me. The gloves in So Much Was Lost are not simply debris, or visual remnants of the pandemic. I view them as individual portraits as well. While they symbolize our collective loss - of life, of human connection, of freedom - they also illustrate humanity’s resilience. As an archive, the sheer number of gloves portray the challenges we can overcome by working together. These images are both a monument to our pain and an optimistic community.

This project was aquired by the San Francisco Arts Commission for a Covid-19 Time Capsule of artwork housed at the SF Main Library. The purchase included a portfolio of prints from the entire series and a book produced for this project.