Bethpage photographer captures more than 100 families during coronavirus outbreak

As photographer Colleen Radcliffe looked through her camera lens at the Wendel family posing outside their Hicksville home, with the father feet away from his wife and children and a surgical mask covering his face, she decided she needed to capture the image in black and white to express the starkness of the moment.

“I normally shoot in color but for a couple of stories as I looked through my lens I saw they really deserved black and white,” Radcliffe, 49, of Bethpage says. She adds, “He’s a nurse and I wanted to make a statement — the sacrifices this man makes every day and his then coming home to his family and making sure not to put them at risk.”

The Wendels' experience is just one of the stories that Radcliffe, a professional portrait and events photographer, is capturing in pictures she is taking for free of families living within the Bethpage Union Free School District during the coronavirus outbreak. Included are residents of Bethpage, Old Bethpage, Plainview and Hicksville who receive their pictures through an emailed download link, with Radcliffe asking in return only that they pay it forward by doing something kind for someone else.

All photographs of the families are taken outside their homes to comply with social distancing guidelines. Radcliffe is offering families the opportunity via local Bethpage Facebook pages. So far she has taken about 100 pictures that can be seen at instagram.com/4_kids_photography_by_colleen/ and on her Facebook, facebook.com/4KidsPhotographyNY/.

“I think it’s awesome that she did that,” says Cheryl Hydo, 51, of Radcliffe taking shots of her family with the kids social distancing on the roof. Hydo, a Bethpage resident, is director of the local preschool, Little Gospel Lights. “I think that one of the best things that has come out of all of this is that the family is getting to spend this time together,” she adds. "We’ve been playing games and taking turns cooking — I have two kids in college and one works full-time so I wanted to remember this moment.”

Bobby Wendel, 42, a nurse at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, who was masked while being photographed in black and white with his family, says the photo “portrays exactly what’s going on in society right now with all the health care workers. We [the Wendels] live in a small two-bedroom ranch. I wear a surgical mask all day [at home and at the hospital] and my wife and kids are living in the basement and I’m in the bedroom with my own bathroom.”

Radcliffe says she got the idea to take the family pictures after learning of a photographer in Massachusetts doing it in his community. She thought it was just something good to do when the virus canceled her other photography work. But her efforts may result in the historical chronicling of life on Long Island during the pandemic that historians and others may look to for years to come, according to Lorraine Stanton, the president of the Farmingdale-Bethpage Historical Society.

“I thought it was just a nice thing to do initially but with each family I photograph I realize this [chronicling] becomes more and more valuable,” says Radcliffe, a mother of four who named the effort, “The Front Steps Project.” “I thought of it as doing something I love but it’s turned out to be not just important to me, but to other people.” 

Radcliffe says the project has also reinforced for her the notion that a picture is worth a thousand words when she got to know something about the families and realized that each image told a different story. She says that while most of her photographs are of families; there has so far been one exception. It is of a photograph of the Bethpage train station shot on a Wednesday during what would normally have been a bustling evening rush hour.

“It’s stark and empty and devoid of commuters at 5:40 p.m.,” Radcliffe points out.

Stacey Rapacki, 43, of Bethpage, began crying as she thought of what this period in life means to her and of how Radcliffe is capturing it.

“It was so heartwarming and special; it was the last day I could be with my parents, Rapacki explains of her family's photo session with Radcliffe. “They live around the corner and had been helping me with the kids for three weeks. But they had to go back home because my husband was going back to work at his family’s business, so he’d be working with customers and we wanted them to be protected.” She adds, “It was just so nice to be able to document us doing this at this time. It’s like a time capsule.”

Radcliffe adds that she’d love to see professional photographers in other Long Island communities do the same project for a bigger picture view of this event.

“It’s certainly a historical time,” Stanton, of the historical society, says. “I’m 74 and I have not seen anything like this [pandemic] in my lifetime and these pictures show that people are somehow surviving and are still able to smile.” She adds the images recall an earlier history as well and show history repeating itself in a good way. “When these are shown years from now they’ll say, ‘This is what happened, but on the flip side this is what happened too.’ We had to live our lives. And it’ll show a time when families were together again — when everyone wasn’t running all over the place and didn’t have time to be together. A few weeks ago, you’d have a hard time getting some of these families in one place at the same time for a picture.”