New York: Still Life is an oral history project documenting what we do during the pandemic and how we feel about what we do.

About this project

Welcome to New York: Still Life. A collection of stories from New Yorkers at the center of the city’s outbreak. Each voice gives a different feeling, a visceral and empathetic sense, of the experiences we are going through, on the frontline, at home, getting by and making change.  At a moment when we've been ordered to keep apart, this project wants to reconnect us. 

It has a particular eye on the vulnerabilities and forms of structural/systemic inequality that made this crisis so acute and challenges us to imagine ways our recovery needs to be more ambitious than getting back to "normal."  This crisis is an opportunity (really a mandate) to evolve.  

We are posting these stories now, piece by piece.  Each will include links to additional information and ways to support related efforts. New voices will be added weekly.

About the author

Cary McClelland is a writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn. His recent book, Silicon City: San Francisco and the Long Shadow of the Valley, is an oral history of the tech boom and wave of change that transformed the Bay Area, and his film, Without Shepherds, tells the story of people in Pakistan on the front lines fighting extremism.

Voices