11:59 (2019)

A photo taken on December 31, 2019, with an accompanying text (written March 2020) for eventhorizon.photo

4.10.2020 

A few months ago I tried to photograph the moment the 2010s turned to the 2020s.

I thought, if I timed it out right, on New Year's Eve I could set a camera up on a tripod, point it at a clock, open the shutter a few seconds before the clock struck midnight, and close it a few seconds after. I would use a digital clock, and in the resulting image the clock face would show a weird number, a composite of 11:59 and 12:00. It would be both my last photo of the 2010s and my first photo of the 2020s. 

I brought my camera and tripod with me to my friend's New Year's party. And I didn't know if they'd have a digital clock there so I brought that, too. But, when the critical moment came I messed up somehow and the shutter closed too soon. All the camera captured was the last moment of 2019 in a pitch-black room. 

~

I'm looking back at my failed attempt to capture the moment of change between the 2010s and the 2020s differently now, in my fourth week of social distancing. 
People talk about there being a date when the calendar switches decades and then a separate date when the people switch decades. People talk about the '80s becoming the '90s upon the fall of the Berlin Wall, the '90s becoming the 2000s upon 9/11, and the 2000s becoming the 2010s upon the financial crisis. The Coronavirus pandemic seems like the 2010s becoming the 2020s.

I'm looking at the Wikipedia articles for each decade [1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s]. The intro section of each article lays out the decade in an extremely tight summary. And then right beside each intro is an image collage, which provides an even tighter synopsis using a handful of photos to visually represent the decade. (The last photo of the 2010s is the Event Horizon Telescope's first photo of a black hole) 

The 2020s doesn't have a collage yet, just one photo of the Coronavirus. There is something so foreboding about the page right now, looking so bare and vacant. I have no concept of how or when the pandemic will be "over". When will people be back in the office? At parties? At concerts? Whatever normal we go back to in the 2020s will not be the normal of the 2010s. I can't imagine what will fill out its collage.