Alessandro Cinque

Freelance Photojournalist

LOST IN NYC UNDER COVID-19

Before the pandemic broke out, I lived in Lima, where I worked freelance and collaborated with Reuters. I had just left Italy and everything I had there to pursue my passion; a hard but conscious choice. After a few months, due to work reasons, I found myself stuck in New York while the Coronavirus was spreading. These were difficult moments, I felt lost and at the mercy of events, without being able to return to what I had considered home for months. During those days the city became more and more deserted, and in the streets I remembered full of people a silence resounded that I had never heard in those places during the time I lived there. And yet, I was surprised to see that I didn't feel the weight of walking through the empty streets. I felt myself understood, lulled by the confusion that enveloped the Big Apple in those days because, deep down, it was the same feeling that I felt inside of me. Once again photography was my anchor and the only certainty I had in that moment, the way I had to understand what was happening outside and inside me. These photos do not speak about a deserted New York, but about a state of mind; I took them thinking about what I felt and not what I was seeing.