Tom Williams, executive producer, Washington; Tony Hicks, deputy director of photography, London; Oded Balilty, chief photographer, Israel; Andrew Selsky, correspondent, Salem, Oregon, and Alyssa Goodman, Top Stories Hub photo editor, coordinated and executed an ambitious multiformat package giving voice to a diverse group of people whose lives have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Williams and Hicks came up with the original idea on a brainstorming call. Balilty shot the first portrait and set the style and technical parameters to ensure a much-needed uniformity of style, look and feel to the project. Goodman was integral in to the vast majority of back-end and presentation work on images, and Selsky knit together a disparate collection of quotes into a compelling text accompaniment.
Evidence of the project’s overall strength, it became AP’s main story on March 11, the one year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a pandemic.