Drop Dead Gorgeous is a visual book comprised of scientific photographs, scientific illustrations and editorial illustrations of the Covid-19 virus sourced online during April, May and June, 2020. The second edition which came out in February 2021, includes new images of the vaccine promising hope for the end of the pandemic.

In 1967 John Szarkowski curated a show at MoMA which examined the aesthetics of scientific photography. The photographs of Covid-19 captured with electron microscopy are colorless until an artist working in the field of scientific illustration transforms them into a full color image. Using brilliant colors borrowed from Baroque paintings and Impressionist sunsets, creates an image with a seductive aesthetics, conceptually in direct conflict with the deadly virus.

The book has a loosely built visual narrative, which gains momentum building toward a sci-fi ending in the first edition. The second edition includes new images from the summer of 2020 as the world talked of social inequities brought out by the pandemic and the eventual discovery of vaccines.

The production of many of the images of Covid-19 speak about artistic labor, since many of them have been created by artists working for stock-photo agencies in countries like India and China, and sold to media outlets around the world. Like photographs of Hiroshima, the Kennedy assassination, and the terror of 9/11, the iconic imagery of Covid-19 collected in Drop Dead Gorgeous is informed by a world wide visual lexicon specific to this moment.