Kirk Crippens: So Long

So Long is a meditation influenced by the pandemic, not purely about it. Kirk Crippens began creating photographs for this project on 17 March 2020, the day the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives, went into quarantine. The last photograph was made on 22 May 2021; a lot had changed.

Crippens’ photography started as two projects but elegantly blend together: the formal colour photographs, made with a medium format camera on a tripod and inspired by Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjørk’s Office series, document the serenity of empty offices, and black and white snapshots, taken with a Polaroid 250 Land Camera and a peel-apart Fuji pack film, that had been preserved in the photographer’s refrigerator for years, capture the dynamic distress of the time.

The quiet and thoughtful photography in the book reveal the photographer’s patience and resonate with the social, cultural, and political world of 2020-2021. The photographs of a painted portrait of George Floyd, a Black Lives Matter poster and a mural honouring Amanda Gorman’s 2021 Presidential Inauguration poem place light on American racism. Dried oranges carefully placed on an office table by a worker who thought they would be out of the office for a few weeks but wound up not returning for months, represent businesses that are no longer robust. Empty seats, often restricted with forbidding tape, stand in for those who will never join us again. Vibrant messages on theatre marquees and signs, like “Quarantine is Temporary/Wu Tang is Forever” provide us with a sense of hope, humour, and irony.