I had a family emergency at the beginning of the pandemic, so I had to take an emergency trip back home to Chicago (I say home, though I have not lived there since 2015; it is where I grew up and lived until I was 10). Consequently, I decided to document my trip.
The desolate airport was unlike anything I had seen before—this was the middle of the week inside of O’Hare International Airport; the fourth-busiest airport per passenger in the world. This instance made me realize how impactful COVID-19 would be to our society. A global transportation hub was almost completely empty; the air was still, the terminals were quiet, and you could almost hear a pin drop. The tension in the room was almost palpable.
This emptiness was extremely foreign to me. I did my fair share of traveling growing up since my grandmother was a flight attendant, so I know how these spaces should have looked. Retrospectively, I am glad to have documented my airport trek—these photos were featured by the City of Chicago in 2020.
