At the end of March I headed up to Orlando to shoot some photographs for Bloomberg Businessweek.  They wanted me to to document the impact that Covid-19 was having on the tourism and restaurant industry. 

This was before the real chaos had started. Everything was terrifying, I guess it still is. I remember driving around in my truck listening a Sporkful Podcast about whether or not you could contract the virus from takeout food We still knew so little, we still know so little. 

The morning was cool by Florida standards, no clouds in the sky. I got off I-4 and started drifting through Disney World at random. It was eerie. Normally everything would have been packed to the gills with a mass of humanity eagerly seeking congress with a giant smiling mouse, on this morning however that world had been deserted. 

I was having trouble capturing the strangeness of it all. How do you photograph what’s not there? I snapped some photos of empty parking lots and empty roads, a drive by frame of someone jogging on the side of an empty highway but they weren’t translating. 

I couldn’t get access to the parks or even anywhere close to them. I eventually gave up trying and headed to the hotel from The Florida Project mostly because I like that movie and it gave me a target. 

I was standing in the parking lot when I heard a helicopter getting closer and closer. It ended up landing almost right in front of me. Helicopter tours! One last hold out amongst a sea of shuttered businesses. 

I got the okay from my editor to go up up and away. The ride was only fifteen minutes but it really put the situation into perspective. The parking lots of the parks are much larger than I realized, larger than the parks themselves. They are massive expanses of gridded black top stretching as far as the eye can see, and they were almost completely empty on a temperate Sunday in spring. 

God’s eye view of an unfolding world scale disaster. Every empty parking spot a physical representation of a job that went away, of a vacation that didn’t happen, a big headed mouse that didn’t get their hug.