STILL / New York City

STILL was a 60-day photography journey through the COVID-19 lockdown in New York City from April to June of 2020. It documents the city that never sleeps, on pause—a time New Yorkers and the world will always remember. Shooting over 30,000 images, John Midgley captured the apocalyptic emptiness seen through his lens: the juxtaposition of a rising death toll and the serenity of peace and quiet. STILL was a compilation of the surreal moments of ordinary human encounters and the process of traveling through the empty streets of NYC for days on end. The book was conceived and designed to allow each image to speak of the journey, much like poetry. The blind spot varnish numbers distributed across the book represented the opaque infection rate and the death toll within New York City during the chaotic pandemic's early days.