Acclaimed actor and photographer Jessica Lange embraced the onslaught of the pandemic and the initial lockdown in New York City in a remarkably intimate and engaging way: having been tempted to read French philosopher Guy Debord’s landmark text, Theory of the Dérive, (drift), she set out any given day with no destination, no purpose in mind, and observed and engaged in (photographed) what prompted her. The results of these excursions and purposeful, intellectual drifting are gathered in her third powerHouse Books volume, Dérive, at once her most audacious and most ambitious photography project to date: gloriously empty streets, mysteriously bustling with compositional energy; perfectly poised individuals, captured as if unwitting extras staged on set; vivid chiaroscuro, voluminous in a wide-pan tableau. New York City was empty in the first few days of the pandemic, but its bones have never been documented in such a manner before Jessica Lange’s masterful eye.

“In March of 2020 when New York City went into lockdown due to Covid, like many others who could, I left the city. I didn’t return until October, seven months later. Everything had changed…
It was a different city. It felt abandoned. Blocks of storefronts were boarded up. All ‘non-essential’ businesses had closed by executive order. The usual crowds of people moving down the streets had disappeared. I read somewhere that a city’s meaning is to make loneliness bearable. There was no masquerading the loneliness now”, Jessica Lange writes in the introduction to her third book.