TITLE: Covid-19, USA. Protect or protest

The images presented in this series are from a far larger long-term photo-essay "My Americana" . Joseph Patronite started this project in 2015. In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, and the USA in a gigantic way. Here, he examines Covid-19 and segments of society refusing to adhere to safety measures.
From drive-thru testing and PPE fashion, heroes and social distancing to the infamous Sturgis (South Dakota) motorcycle rally which became a super-spreader event with over 30,000 positive Covid cases from the over 400,000 mostly unmasked attendees. Early in 2021, after over 500,000 United States citizens died from Covid, young persons gathered unmasked at Spring Break events in Texas on the Gulf of Mexico, again flaunting protections.

AUTHOR: Joseph Patronite (United States)

Joseph Patronite has spent his life behind the camera, having his first pictures published in newspapers while in his teens followed by a dozen years of daily photojournalism. Sports, editorial and advertising imagery have been commissioned and produced since the 1980’s.

He is a three-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in Photography.

In the early 2000s, leaving sports event and sports advertising behind, Patronite rededicated his interests, efforts and energies to returning to documentary photography, his first passion.

Over the past two decades, long-term photographic still essays have included the struggles, decline and death of his father due to Alzheimer’s Disease, a one-tented family circus, operated since the 1850s. Dia de los Muertos/Day of the Dead is an on-going project created in 2008.

The most ambitious project, “My Americana”, started in 2015 is a contemporary collection of imagery on the United States of America. Thematically this project deals with current issues, patriotism, secular and non-secular celebrations among other topics. This project, mostly self-funded and personally motivated continues in 2021, having switched directions to coverage of social strife, political divide and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

The outcome of this essay will be in book and exhibition forms. Patronite’s interests also include short documentary cinema. Projects like African American women living for decades with HIV/AIDS, contemporary burlesque and a world ranked triathlete are finished or in various places in production.