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In El Inquilino, Mexico City, photographer and writer Tom Griggs reflects on the experience of isolation and adaptation during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Newly arrived from Colombia, he found himself quarantined in one of the world’s most complex cities, a metropolis dense with history and dynamic humanity. His work observes how life continued under restriction: empty streets, shuttered storefronts, and fragments of human presence revealing how individuals and neighborhoods quietly adjusted to uncertainty and uneven public policy.
Mexico City’s official response to the pandemic was inconsistent, marked by limited enforcement and strong variation between districts. Griggs’s photographs reflect that tension. They show a city both holding its breath and improvising its own rules, people navigating risk through habit, faith and routine. The result is a layered portrait of a place adapting in real time, where social fabric and survival instincts became more visible than ever.
For Griggs, the experience of being a “tenant” in this setting deepened his ongoing exploration of belonging and displacement. Living alone in an unfamiliar city under lockdown, he used the camera as a way to map both external terrain and internal state. El Inquilino becomes not only a record of Mexico City in a moment of deep insecurity, but also a meditation on how we occupy space physically, emotionally, and politically when the world around us abruptly narrows.
About Tom Griggs
Tom Griggs is a photographer, writer, editor and educator based between Medellín, Colombia, and Mexico City. He has spent the past decade teaching at Universidad de Antioquia and Fundación Universitaria Bellas Artes in Medellín.
Griggs’s projects and essays have appeared in publications including Gatopardo, Report on Business Magazine, AFAR, Travesías, Valor and Newsweek Japan. His photobook Ghost Guessed, created with Paul Kwiatkowski, was named one of the best photobooks of 2018 by Photo-Eye, ASX, The British Journal of Photography, and Humble Arts Foundation.
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That grief breaks my heart. Don’t mess with Quetzalcoatl!