Stay Home

As the novel coronavirus spread in the first months of 2020, governments worldwide told people to stay home.

Video calls and messaging apps became a lifeline and a way of bringing people together while travel — or even leaving the house — was prohibited.

From my home in Italy, the first Western country to be hit by the virus and to impose a full lockdown, I collected stories from across the world about how people were facing the pandemic and coping with the measures imposed in their countries to try to curb its spread.

I interviewed people via video call on their mobile phones, and used my camera to take portraits of them as they appeared on my computer screen.

From a national park in Brazil to the Gaza Strip, from China to Niger, from a teacher in Athens to a sex worker in Colombia, an Afghan asylum seeker in a refugee camp to a priest in a hospital in Milan, people expressed uncertainty, fear and resilience in the face of the unknown.