Documenting and Reflecting upon Pandemic-era New York: A Photographic Qualitative Study Employing Photo-essays and Visual Autoethnography

This study analyzes photographs and diaries taken in New York during the early pandemic from a phenomenological perspective. The photographs are not merely documentary rather than they function as fields of experience in which perception, the body, and temporality intersect. By employing photo‐essays, the interaction between language and image is explored. From the data analysis, the following categories emerged fear and isolation, social conflict, cultural deficiency the daily realities of survival, the ethics of essential workers, hope and recovery. Theoretically, the study draws on Husserl’s inquiry into essence, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception, and Sontag’s reflections on photography. Photographs become a testimonial domain that reveals the emotional geography of the pandemic city and its social inequalities. Upon revisiting in 2022, evidence of urban adaptation and change was observed in screening central Park, vaccination sites, and other infrastructures. The academic contribution of this research lies in integrating phenomenology, visual culture, and arts-based research, while offering implications for education and therapeutic potential. Through the images and narratives of pandemic-era New York, this study delineated how individual experience may be elevated into universal social meaning. It demonstrated that photography can serve both as a vehicle for scholarly knowledge production and as a practice of civic testimony and healing. This suggests strongly the need for a research-practice model that combines image-based evidence with storytelling in domains of education, public health, and urban cultural policy. Phenomenological photographic inquiry thus emerges as a novel qualitative methodological approach that reveals human experience in its multilayered complexity.