Picturing the Pandemic: Images from PJP

Picturing the Pandemic explores how people around the globe use images to tell their own pandemic stories—and to question and critique our changing world. At once joyful and devastating, funny, and tragic, the exhibition explores how images—making them, looking at them, thinking with them—can spark new ways of seeing ourselves, learning from others, claiming our voices, and creating meaningful change in the world.

“Time to Get Jabbed.” Contributed to the Pandemic Journaling Project by journaler Kathy Brew.

What does a pandemic look like? What has COVID-19 helped us, or made us, see? How has it changed our sense of what counts as true—or whose truth counts?

In late spring 2020, a team at the University of Connecticut and Brown University created the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), an online space where people around the world could create a weekly record of their pandemic experiences in writing, audio, or images. Over 1,800 people in 55 countries contributed nearly 27,000 journal entries—including almost 3,000 photos. PJP's mission is simple:

Usually, history is written only by the powerful. When the history of COVID-19 is written, let's make sure that doesn't happen.

In Picturing the Pandemic, PJP teams up with Seeing Truth: Art, Science, Museums, and Making Knowledge to explore the open-ended power of journaling as a way to share our pandemic experiences, learn from others, find our creativity, and strengthen our voice. We ask: How can images—making them, looking at them, thinking with them—expand our capacity for self-care, history-writing, and change-making in our tough and troubled world?

Picturing the Pandemic launched in Hartford, Connecticut, in Fall 2022. In Spring 2023, new iterations of the exhibition opened in three new locations — in close collaboration with local partners and co-curators in Providence, Heidelberg, and Mexico City. Since 2023, the traveling version has traveled to Toronto, Storrs (Connecticut), and Syracuse (New York).