McCarren Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn – Covid-19 lockdown – © Brian Rose

In 1981, the songwriter Jack Hardy and I created something called the Fast Folk Musical Magazine. It was a monthly album/publication that was recorded in a home studio and typed up on an IBM Selectric. The recordings were simple, unadorned, mostly first takes. The idea was to provide a platform for a community of songwriters mostly ignored by the music industry. We had no money, only time, and youthful energy. That project, now archived by the Smithsonian Institute, was an extraordinary demonstration of what can be done when the electricity of the moment is harnessed.

Creativity, often, comes with a sense of urgency or topicality that either finds an outlet or is lost. Sometimes, it’s necessary to seize the moment and work around established parameters. And sometimes it’s necessary, even, to take to the streets, as we are seeing so vividly.

McCarren Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn – 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence – © Brian Rose

I began shooting “In Time of Plague” in the third week of March when the Covid-19 lockdown went into effect, and I should have books by the third week of June. Three months from start to finish.

Wythe Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn – © Brian Rose

In a picture I took a few days ago of protesters marching through Williamsburg, one is seen holding a sign that says “White Supremacy is the Virus.” Susan Sontag in 1978 argued persuasively against the idea of illness as metaphor, and she was right, that once a cure for a disease is found, the romantic associations attached to that particular malady tend to fall away.

But we are presently in a moment of both corporal and spiritual affliction in which metaphor and reality become intertwined.