Worlding the Post-Pandemic

In this chapter, Brent Luvaas argues that creative documentation—through photography and autoethnographic writing—is a deliberate practice of world-making that enables resilience and perceptual transformation during crisis. Confined to his Philadelphia home, Luvaas employs skills honed in street and fashion photography to document domestic life, routines, and family interactions, turning lockdown’s constraints into a generative, inhabitable world. His images and notes prioritize mood, ambiguity, and immediacy, enacting engagement rather than passive observation. This chapter demonstrates that aesthetic practices actively reshape how the self inhabits space and perceives reality: documenting life is not merely recording it but remaking it. Luvaas shows that such creative work fosters adaptive coping, relational care, and renewed perception, offering a model for how artistic and autoethnographic practices can help individuals endure and re-world disrupted environments in post-pandemic life.