LI Photographer Documents Small Businesses In 'Project Face Mask'

PATCHOGUE, NY — Benny Migliorino is a professional photographer who lives and works in Patchogue Village. With the coronavirus pandemic slowing his business and wedding workload, he decided to take on a personal project and document the feelings and emotions of small business owners during a strange time.

"Project Face Mask" is a series of wide-lens black and white portraits of business owners in their empty establishments, wearing the ubiquitous masks of Long Island during COVID-19. Migliorino first reached out to small businesses that are part of the Greater Patchogue Chamber of Commerce but may now expand, as more Long Islanders have begun to ask to be featured.

"I wanted to document what was going on," Migliorino told Patch. He is using a camera lens that gives the photographs an eerie, photojournalistic effect, different from the normal portraits he would shoot for corporate clients.

"The 14-millimeter focal length gives a bit of a distorted point of view. Living through this pandemic is definitely giving us all a distorted point of you and our day-to-day activities. So I feel this was the perfect fit."

He may begin charging a nominal fee for the portraits, he said, and donate proceeds to charity. He is considering turning the collection of 52 portraits and counting into a gallery showing or book eventually.

"I want to encompass people's emotions. They aren't meant to be pretty pictures."