Photographer captures Edmonton in the time of COVID-19

When Edmonton photographer Rebecca Lippiat was doing front porch portrait sessions in spring of 2020, she realized that those photos were chronicling the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on everyday people.

"I wanted to document people's experience of COVID," Lippiat told CBC's Radio Active. "It should be documented." 

That was the seed that grew into Edmonton in the Time of COVID, a collection of stories created with a grant from the Edmonton Heritage Foundation. Lippiat hopes it will show future generations how the virus changed society right down to individual homes. 

Lippiat has a degree in science where she specialized in microbiology, and a deep interest in pandemics. 

In her research of previous pandemics, she found many stories from the perspective of "caretakers" but very little describing how life changed for average citizens.

"When you look back at previous pandemics, there's not a lot of history around how everyday people navigated their way through the pandemic," she said. 

The first story she told was about an Edmonton mail carrier.