Rooftop: A 2022 Shanghai Lockdown Record

In 2022, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, the government of Shanghai announced a quarantine requiring all residents to isolate at home for seven days—a confinement that ultimately extended to 83 days. During that period, I had only a low-resolution camera and a large zoom lens of modest optical quality.

In this book, the outdoor photographs were taken on the eve of the citywide lockdown and during the three days following the partial reopening. Beyond those brief intervals, I found myself almost daily climbing to the rooftop of my apartment building to capture fragments of the outside world. The rooftop—unrenovated and cluttered with dust-covered objects—was one of the few places where sunlight could break through. For those of us confined inside the building, it became the largest space available for movement, a narrow but necessary territory of freedom.