Pandemic Photos Mark A Turn — Or Do They?

New Haven-based photographer Roderick Topping has been documenting the Elm City throughout the pandemic and before. That work is now being celebrated with a new exhibition at the New Haven Museum called ​“Strange Times” that, in the first week of its opening, garnered media attention from WTNH, the New Haven Register, and the Yale Daily News. What does it mean that Topping’s photos — which he’s been posting on social media as he takes them — have been collected, and now resonate so strongly?

Are we, in some cultural sense, turning a corner in how we understand the pandemic?

“Living most of my adult life in downtown New Haven, I’ve always known it to be a bustling and diverse hub of students, workers, academics, businesspeople, tourists, transients, the homeless and wealthy alike,” Topping writes in an accompanying note to the exhibit. ​“Exciting and sometimes troubled. New Haven has never been quiet. The Covid era changed all of this. For the first time in my memory the city was silent. The facade of city streets, buildings, sidewalks, utility poles, mailboxes, sewer grates, fire plugs, shop displays, manhole covers, alleyways, and all the other backdrops of life gained new importance as the skeleton of the town revealed itself in our absence. For the past year and half I’ve been walking the streets documenting this new reality in New Haven. These photographs focus on the strructures, outlines, and topography that serve as the background to our daily lives. Many of the photos here are black and white, much how I think I’ll remember these days: bleak, lonely, and surreal.”

Topping has been taking pictures since he was 10 years old (see previous Independent articles here and here on his work), and practicing street photography for decades in New Haven and elsewhere. He honed his eye to capture strong symmetries, abstract shapes. He has a knack for capturing people in isolation, or in small groups, in relation to their built environments. Those skills turned out to be perhaps uniquely suited to the pandemic, where he noted last year that the lack of cars parked on the street let him take images of, say, the Anchor Spa (above) from across the street that would have been impossible otherwise. During the pandemic, the city was laid bare, and Topping was there to help us see it, from the isolation of 2020 to the city’s gradual reopening this year.

But for Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, the New Haven Museum’s director of photo archives, there was a longer view to consider as well. ​“I’ve always liked Rod’s work,” said Bischoff-Wurstle. He was drawn to Topping’s photographic style, which he described as ​“noirish, almost unsentimental.” But it was also the substance, the subjects Topping chose. ​“He catches the New Haven that you know, and I know, and everyone knows. He’s documenting.” Besides liking Topping’s photographs on a personal level, there was also the simple fact that Topping had been effectively capturing New Haven for so long.

“He’s been doing this casually since the late 1980s,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“From the museum’s perspective, that is a gap that I’ve been meaning to fill,” because ​“100 years from now, the street scene that he took will be informative.” To Bischoff-Wurstle, Topping’s photographs fit ​“shoulder to shoulder” with those of T.S. Bronson, who was an avid photographer of New Haven 100 years ago, and whose work is now in the New Haven Museum’s collection. Bronson’s photos have become indispensable to noting changes large and small in New Haven’s streets; Bischoff-Wurstle already sees differences between the moments Topping captured and the current situation. ​“That building, or that business, is gone already. That’s the stuff that matters. We all live and we forget — we don’t think we forget, but we do.”

The exhibition of Topping’s work, showing us the very recent past, opens up the question of what constitutes ​“history.” The core of the New Haven Museum’s collection reaches back into the earliest days of the New Haven Colony and (perhaps most famously) covers the Amistad case of 1839. But to Bischoff-Wurstle, more recent times count too, as evidenced by the museum’s Factory show, which opened in Feb. 2020 (and is still up).

Drawing attention to more recent history ​“obviously connects with people,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. Plus, ​“you have a generation in their teens and twenties that are far enough removed that they haven’t seen it and would like to. We’re just at that point.”

The show of Topping’s pandemic pictures are, of course, much more recent than that. ​“With ​‘Factory’ I drew a line at 20 years” to encapsulate the story of the building. In the case of Topping’s photos, ​“there are things that were shot two weeks before the show opened that just made it in.” Without losing the long view that the museum’s collection provides, it’s also true that ​“three weeks ago is history now.”

And what a history it is. Even in the span of the last year — from this summer to last summer — it’s possible to discern major changes in New Haven’s street life from Topping’s photographs. His shots from 2020 show people in isolation, masked, hurrying down the street. His shots from this summer show people eating together outside of restaurants, masks off, enjoying a little leisure.

“Things are moving so fast. Our sense of time is thrown off,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“We went from ​‘the world is ending’ to arguing about vaccines. Not to mention the political background” — nationally and in the city. ​“He’s on the ground capturing that.” To Bischoff-Wurstle, amid the disruptions and changes that Covid-19 wrought, Topping’s photographs capture moments in the movements of two larger forces at play.

“New Haven is becoming wealthier — but is it becoming wealthier?” Meaning wealthier for everyone? Is downtown as accessible as it used to be? Does everyone who used to go there still feel like there’s a place for them there? Those questions are at the heart of discussion in town and elsewhere. New Haven’s broader development pattern is ​“a bellwether for the country, or least the liberal part of the country,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. As people return to New Haven’s streets, they may find that both they and the streets have changed.

The other longer-term change still afoot is that of the climate; in the warmer winters of the past decade or so, evidence of it is starting to feel lived as well as just observed in data. ​“Here we are in the middle of October and it’ll probably be 80 degrees again,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“New Haven is becoming like Virginia Beach. I look at photos from five years ago and I wonder, ​‘why did I have all those clothes on?’” Returning to street life can highlight those changes as well.

“There’s a paradigm shift, and we’re living through it. And you want to make sure you have pictures of it,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“To have it documented is so essential. When we go back and reflect on the Spanish flu of 1917 and 1918, we don’t have a lot. Stuff gets blurry really fast.”

In the timing of it all — of putting the exhibit together, of the public being able to see it, of the press the exhibit has received — it’s tempting to imagine that, culturally, New Haven has turned a corner in dealing with the pandemic.

“We’re in the level of acceptance in the stages of grief,” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“Not everyone’s accepting it, but we’re there.” It’s possible that we’re going to live with this, and eventually we won’t really pay much mind,” at least until ​“something else comes down the pike.” And on the other hand, ​“maybe now this will be the new normal. Maybe I’ll be telling my kids, ​‘yeah, people used to eat inside.’”

But taking the longer view, Topping’s photographs help remind us that — even without a pandemic and historic political upheaval — our lives change a lot, in ways large and small. ​“Everyone says ​‘let’s get back to normal.’ But what is normal?” Bischoff-Wurstle said. ​“What would have been normal for me two years ago is not normal for me now.” It’s the change that’s normal. ​“For the most part, people subtly change, they develop new ​‘normal’ habits. You’re not going back to 2019. But you wouldn’t have anyway.”

“Strange Times” is current running at the New Haven Museum, 114 Whitney Ave. To schedule a visit, make an appointment through the museum’s website.