Hardcover with half dust jacket, edition of 1000 copies, design by Victor Levie, foreword by René de Guzman, essay by Shannon Perich.

So Long is a meditation influenced by the pandemic, not purely about it. Kirk Crippens began creating photographs for this project on March 17, 2020, the day the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives, went into quarantine. The last photograph was made on May 22, 2021; a lot had changed.

Crippens’s photography started as two projects but elegantly blend together: the formal color photographs, made with a medium format camera on a tripod and inspired by Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk’s Office series, document the serenity of empty offices and businesses struggling to adjust to the pandemic, while black and white instant photos, taken with a Polaroid Land camera and a peel-apart film, that had been preserved in the photographer’s refrigerator for years, capture the dynamic distress of the time.

The quiet and thoughtful photography in the book reveal the photographer’s patience and resonate with the social, cultural, and political world of 2020-2021. The photographs of a painted portrait of George Floyd, a Black Lives Matter sign and a mural honoring Amanda Gorman’s 2021 Presidential Inauguration poem place light on American racism. Dried oranges carefully placed on an office table by a worker who thought they would be out of the office for a few weeks but wound up not returning for months, represent businesses that are no longer robust. Empty seats, often restricted with forbidding tape, stand in for those who will never join us again. Vibrant messages on theater marquees and signs, like “Quarantine is Temporary/Wu Tang is Forever” provide us with a sense of hope, humor, and irony.

"For this project I used a Polaroid 250 Land Camera and Fuji Instant FP-3000B, a peel-apart pack film, for the black and white photos. The prints are tiny, 3.25” x 4.25” (73 mm x 95 mm), and they have white borders like traditional darkroom prints. The film also creates a paper negative. In contrast to the handheld Polaroid camera, the color photographs were made formally, with a medium format camera on a tripod." (Kirk Crippens)

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