Peter Scharff is a superb portrait photographer, as he demonstrated in his previous collection Facing Parkinson’s. At first glance, Facing the Pandemic may appear to be a straightforward companion volume— personal stories of the impact of a disease on people’s lives, coupled with Peter’s acutely observed portraits of the storytellers. But there’s something unsettling about the portraits this time around. They’re not photographs of people. They’re photographs of screens.

During the pandemic shutdown, when we couldn’t see or be with each other in the flesh, we had to settle for interacting with digital images of each other via apps like Zoom. But for many of us those apps were more alienating than comforting. So far from really being together, we were never even really looking at each other. We were looking at screens, pixelated by some algorithm to project an insubstantial semblance of ourselves.