Adaptation

2022







Adaptation is a documentary photography book capturing a local grocery store during the COVID-19 pandemic. The physical object reflects its subject: bound in book cloth with two ⅛-inch metal covers, the back features a cutout of a mask, a direct reference to the sterile, guarded conditions that defined daily life at the time.

The book isn't interested in documenting the pandemic's sadness. That story has been told. Instead, Adaptation turns toward something that received far less attention: the experience of essential workers, and specifically what sets them apart from everyone else. While most people were home and isolated, grocery store employees were still showing up, still moving through a space with other people, still building something that resembled normal. They had community when almost no one else did.

That dynamic is complicated. These businesses were under enormous strain, higher demand, longer hours, an emotional weight that wasn't part of the job description. And yet there was also something alive in those spaces. Adaptation tries to sit with both of those truths at once, examining the strange mixture of fatigue and human connection that defined that particular experience.

© Glenn JamesonPortfolio2026