The first COVID-19 virtual museum becomes a visual time capsule for future generations.
The Covid Photo Museum is the world’s first virtual museum dedicated to the curation of photography captured during the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to capture a global perspective from the time of quarantine in 2019-2020. The exhibitions are a curation from all perspectives across the world, including photographs both from renowned professional photographers, and everyday people.
I begun this project with my creative partner in Amsterdam, Billy Linker, as a personal project. Like many people experiencing this strange pandemic, our mornings and evenings were often spent obsessing over every article and image published. We began to send each other impactful images we’d find. In these strange times, filled with so many emotions, photography has a way of capturing the truth unlike any other medium.
We organized the photographs into exhibitions or themes that uniquely represented living in the time of Covid-19, from photographs all across the world of people looking out their windows, to the almost comedic reality of sanitising unexpected locations around the entire world.
1.5 Meters explores the eerie and often times atypical spatial patterns formed by COVID-19 social distancing regulations.
On Pause from Above shows the unique vantage point by looking at our changed world from a bird’s eye view.
Exhibition Enclosed Spaces focuses on how the spaces that were once familiar from pre-quarantine life have changed subtly and dramatically.
The Two Pandemics series aims to provide a first hand account of a country growing from a painful past as it struggles to find a more equitable way forward into the future.
On social, to promote the Covid Photo Museum, we built an instagram photography page with no photographs at all. The aim was to announce the addition of new exhibitions, and to drive viewers to our site for a peek.
Partnership
The Rotterdam Photo Festival reached out to us, to partner with the Covid Photo Museum in 2022. We worked closely with them and the photographers on our website to curate the physical exhibition.
Press
“When people want to remember what COVID-19 has caused in the future, they will look here” Haaretz
“Three artist-led initiatives that are chronicling the coronavirus experience,” The Art Newspaper
“June: Books and Exhibitions,” The British Journal of Photography
“What historians will use to document lockdown,” The Sunday Times
“The role of museums during the pandemic,” Creative Review
“Rethinking Museums Business Models, Digitalisation, and Courage Issues,” Curtain
“5 Festival di fotografia in Europa da non perdere,” Icon Magazine
“What creatives do in isolation #22: The Covid Photo Museum,” The Stable
Live radio interview with Tali Lipkin in Galei Tzahal, Israel radio station (53:22)
“Nasce il Covid Photo Museum per raccontare la vita al tempo della pandemia,” YM
“The First COVID-19 museum was created on the internet,” Pelna Kulturka