The eerie calm of empty schoolyards

Before Covid-19 hit the San Francisco Bay Area, photojournalist Justin Sullivan could upload a raw file to Getty Images in seconds. Now, this may take several minutes. “Between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m., the internet just stagnates,” Sullivan says. "Everybody's on Zoom calls and watching movies or whatever."

This "anything" includes homework. Since March 17, when six local counties enacted a shelter-in-place order to slow the spread of the coronavirus, schools have been closed and education has moved online. Google Classroom and other platforms let kids take quizzes, submit assignments, and video chat with teachers and friends, though IRL classrooms remain empty for the rest of the year school.

Sullivan found a unique angle on closures when he spotted a surprisingly colorful schoolyard on Google Maps. He scanned the satellite views to find out more and set about shooting the coolest ones with his DJI Mavic II Pro drone. It's been his primary tool for documenting changes in San Francisco, from a waiting storage lot with new cars to a line of customers wrapping around a Costco. "It provides a level of context that people need to see to really understand how huge this crisis is," he says.

From 200 feet up, playgrounds morph into abstraction, their shapes and squiggles straight out of a Joan Miró painting. But what stands out most is the eerie calm of a place once filled with exuberant children playing tag, hopscotch and skipping rope. Now their vast reserves of energy are funneled into Nintendo Switches and GoNoodle Sessions, with nothing to connect them except the fiber and copper wires running through their walls.

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