This is the first post from my long-term photography project titled “COVID–19 Signage Project”[^1]. It’s a collection of photos I’ve been taking since roughly March of 2020, and the subjects are pieces of printed signage related to the COVID–19 pandemic. While I probably took the earliest of these photos because I find simple, straight shots of signage inherently interesting, I started collecting them more deliberately as summer 2020 got closer. That summer I’d be teaching an online course in technical writing, and the course emphasizes that technical writing exists all around us, and that it tends to reflect the culture and values of the persons and organizations that produce it[^2].
This made me wonder: In the midst of a pressing, public health crisis, what are the ways in which signage might capture the culture and values of the persons and organizations that produce it?
They might be captured in the tone and colors of the signage, indicating a company’s interest in maintaining coherence between this signage and their brand identity (Sheetz does a great job with this), or, they might be captured in the language used to communicate the message. After all, there is a difference between “No Mask? No Service!” and “Governor Tom Wolf has ordered that all customers must wear a mask when entering our business.”
Nuances of sentence structure, tone, and punctuation say a whole darn lot, especially during a crisis and especially in a medium in which the audience’s attention span and the amount of available display real estate are limited.
Outside of culture and values, the ways that businesses produced these signs also indicates the company’s resources in the midst of this disaster. For a large chain, signs might be printed as colorful window decals. For a small local bar owner, the available means might be a sharpie, a piece of posterboard, and a procedure mask.
I ultimately didn’t carve out a spot for using these in my technical writing course, so the purpose shifted from collecting images for use in class to collecting images for an ongoing photography project, and the form of it has since been influenced by interviews I listened to featuring photographers Scott Strazzante and Neil Kramer. The scope of it has also ultimately gotten a bit wider, as my purpose has expanded to include documenting in my own way the shifting winds of the pandemic and the state and business responses to it over the course of over a year.
Like many, I would have thought or hoped that the pandemic would have ended by now. Tragically, that is not the case. Now and then, I think that this project is done, only for a guidance to change, or for case numbers to spike, and then these signs shift in messaging. The passage of time also makes these signs interesting because, particularly evident in the ones left in place since the pandemic’s onset, they age.
Like us, these bits of paper or plastic did not expect to be in pandemic-world for this long.
In terms of organizational method, I am grouping these photos by the specific language they use or a theme that I’ve seen in them. Unfortunately, full-time graduate school work does not leave me the time to caption these with location, time, and date. What this means is that a given post may include photos from both early and late in the pandemic grouped together, without a clear visual indicator for when the photo was taken (though, if you dig, it’s possible that that metadata still shows up if you download the photo).
So given all that, I encourage you to read this not as a linear, historical record of pandemic signage, but as clusters of related images.
Finally, these are signs that I came across in my own day to day experiences. This means that they are far from comprehensive in terms of capturing anything close to the pandemic’s signage as a whole. This also means that they are coming from someone existing in some very particular places (mostly central Pennsylvania, but also, among others, the Philadelphia suburbs, Baltimore, northeast Pennsylvania, and Ogunquit, Maine), and from someone of the privileged upper-middle class, with the financial wherewithal to own the phones or standalone cameras used to take the photos, the leisure time to write these blog posts and share the photos, and the habits of day-to-day life and travel that include patronizing the retail establishments and restaurants that are the venue for a majority of these images.
In that sense, this is a sort of unintentional journal of me and my own activities as well. That’s I guess fitting, because I am quite literally reflected in many of these images. I tried dodging my way out of the reflections on doors and windows, but soon decided to just go with it.
It’s not the most clever title, but I’ve thought of it this way for months now, and barring any very compelling reasons, I guess that’s just what I’ll call it ↩
The latter is one of the core characteristics of technical communication, as described in the course’s textbook, Technical Communication, by Mike Markel and Stuart Selber. ↩