Scenes From Your Pandemic

We recently asked New York readers to share scenes from their daily lives during the coronavirus pandemic for a new series we hope will help all of us see beyond our limited perspectives amid this unprecedented and often isolating experience. The hundreds of submissions you’ve sent in have included everything from socially distanced encounters with neighbors to essential-worker tributes to bedroom fencing to countless views observed from walks, rooftops, and improvised home offices.

- The New Yorker

Ask An Expert: Why Is Self-Isolation Making Me So Horny?

Investigating a very common side effect of the coronavirus crisis.

There's a lot to feel anxious abut right now. You’re struggling to adapt to working from home, video conferencing with your boss as your half-dressed housemates wander in and out of shot. Or maybe you've been let go from your job, with no idea how you’re going to pay rent this month. Or you could just be on your sofa, trying to remember how to read a book because your other hobby – feeling the sun on your skin as you down pints of wine in a beer garden – is no longer allowed.

- Vice

When the Phallus Was Fashion

A day in the life of Ancient Rome wasn’t a cake walk. If you were going to make a decent life for yourself, you had to be tough. You didn’t wear your heart on your sleeve – you wore a penis fascinus ’round your neck, prayed to the gods, and hoped for the best. A curious little historical relic, the phallic amulet paid homage to the eponymous god of vitality and power, and was treasured by its wearers not as a romantic instrument, but as a necessary precaution against evil. (In fact, it was often bestowed upon young girls and boys for protection). In that sense, these little weiners were rather remarkable in the holistic, unstigmatised bridges they built between ones sexual, physical, and spiritual identity.

- Messy Nessy Chic

Made in California

There is an image that comes to mind for most when we talk about California. Scenes of golden sunshine washing pastel-hued homes and colorful Cadillacs, loud neon nights blinking on at sunset for restaurants, theaters, motels, and an overall sense that things were simple then. It is a place where nostalgia runs king, forever immortalized in both the cinema from years past but also in its architecture that attests to distinctive periods. 

I wanted to capture this memory of California in a visual essay, from the regal 1920s era San Franciscan fire escapes to the playful 1950s theaters dotting the coastline. Because of the place's strong cinematic history, it doesn't take much to recall how it may have felt living in these time periods in the golden state. One can imagine riding a bike down to the boardwalk from the Rio theater in Santa Cruz, listening to the Beach Boys. Or the Summer of Love in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco against a backwash of painted ladies, the noble Victorian homes delicately painted and meticulously cared for as their name would suggest.

- behance

The Complicated New World of Voyeurism

The saying is we’re ‘living in strange times’, right? But just how “strange” are we willing to admit we’re becoming too? The nature of the worldwide lockdowns has us all looking out of our windows significantly more, searching for something or someone to uplift, inform or entertain us. As we applaud front liners with our neighbours in the city every night, or watch them serenade a block of apartments with a violin aria, we’re being invited into their lives through those warmly-lit windows, just as long as we don’t outstay our welcome. Watching other people’s lives is an inherently human fascination. Some may call it people-watching or human curiosity. Others might call it an invasion of privacy, snooping, spying or stalking. Voyeurism as a general term, will always carry a social taboo overall, but when there’s something interesting to be seen, people tend to cast aside their reservations.

- Messy Nessy Chic

Confessions Of A Cuckold’s Wife

My husband opened up the idea of cuckolding, he’s had the fantasy for a long while and although I was happy to role play the idea in bed I really did not want to see it through in reality. It just seemed like such a bad idea for so many reasons. I was also totally disinterested in any idea of humiliating or belittling him.

But…the sexy seed was sown and we talked and talked and talked about it and I sort of said that I wouldn’t rule it out, if the perfect situation came around… I said this really because I felt that if I just said “I’m happy to mess around in fantasy land but will NEVER do this in real life.” It would just have the effect of killing the fantasy.

- Caveman Circus

Down These Mean Streets

Down These Mean Streets examines fear and the abandonment of America’s inner cities. Photographing only at night with a large format view camera, I work in a set routine by walking between the airport and central business district of each city I photograph. America has turned its back on cities as years of neglect have left our cities with limited resources to repair themselves and neighborhoods to crumble with no local economy, a public education system that barely meets requirements, a low income housing nightmare, as violence and drugs reign making survival a number one priority.

- Will Steacy

Behind the Yakuza: documenting the women of Japan’s mafia

Photographer Chloé Jafé’s new series lends a voice to the notoriously closed subculture of women associated with the Yakuza.

The underworld infamy of organised crime has long been romanticised in pop culture. On the silver screen, cult classics like The Godfather or Goodfellas have shaped the public’s perceptions of what being a mobster means. In 2015, Netflix’s Narcos shifted the focus towards Colombia’s criminal organisations through the story of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.

In Japan, organised crime syndicates are deeply embedded in the country’s business affairs and culture. However, stories about the women – the wives, daughters, mistresses, and bar hostesses – that orbit around the criminal activities of the male gangsters are rarely heard of.

- Dazed

A World Without People

For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have evacuated or otherwise abandoned many places around the world—large and small, old and new. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to suddenly vanish from the planet.

- The Atlantic

WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE DO IT

In times of crisis, the love affairs of strangers remain endlessly absorbing.

I live in Bloomsbury, a London neighborhood whose name is synonymous with a long-gone, still-romanticized period of post-Victorian literary and sexual experimentation. Today, its reputation is built primarily around its convenient spread of transit links, which loop out in every direction, funneling sardine-packed commuters in and out of the hipper, more residential zones of the city. As a result, my pocket of the city is a bustling epicenter of low-stakes weeknight courtship: first or second dates, after-work drinks or single-course meals, arrived at with low expectations and curfews in mind. By 10:30 p.m. most nights, the streets return to quiet. Occasionally, if the weather permits, a pair will linger outside the upscale bar across the road from my flat, struck silly by unexpected chemistry, or too much weeknight wine, or a combination of the two.

- The Outline

Perchance to Dream: Photographing Sleep - Twenty vintage snapshots of watching people sleep

The intimacy of sleep is a subject mainly found in snapshots as opposed to fine art photography, writes Robert E. Jackson. The reason is that to be a witness to such an action, the person holding the camera generally must have a close association with the person sleeping– such as being a friend, lover, or family member. There is a vulnerability to being caught unawares in the act of sleeping, yet there is also a beauty to which these images attest. While voyeuristic in nature, these photos derive from a sense of play- one of the defining aspects of snapshot photography. Such a relationship between subject and photographer as a dualistic (i.e. two person) act of creating a photographic image is pretty much eliminated now in snapshots, as selfies are all about the photographer and the subject being the same person. Part of the “me” of the contemporary photographic narrative as opposed to the “we” of older snapshots.

- Flashbak

Oser la déco érotique

En 2016 et en 2017, au souk@sat, les clients reculaient parfois lorsqu’ils arrivaient à la table d’Amélie Dionoski. Sa gamme Erotico ne fait pas dans la dentelle. Ou plutôt, si : dans le porte-jarretelles en dentelle, brodé sur des coussins ! La déco coquine est aujourd’hui plus courante. Oseriez-vous en ajouter dans votre salon ?

- La Presse

You Need A Japanese James Bond Poster On Your Wall

That's you, that is, mournfully rolling up a Pulp Fiction poster and yanking blue tack from the walls. You're moving in with your partner, and they understandably don't want the new flat to look like a disused Blockbuster branch. So all of those movie posters you collected at university – Fight Club, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface – are destined for the bin, to be replaced by Hockneys and house plants. It's truly for the best.

But you can't help it. You need at least one piece of movie memorabilia in the flat to truly make it your own. A small patch of wall space to remind you that, hey, Garden State was pretty good, wasn't it? And if that's the case, then we suggest looking to Japan for inspiration, where the film posters are generally more stylistically exciting and bizarre than their Western counterparts, especially back in the mid-century.

- Esquire