Monday was just an ordinary day for Joshua Bickel. A photojournalist for the Columbus Dispatch, he set out to cover a protest outside Ohio governor Mike DeWine’s daily press briefing, where about 100 protesters had gathered. He dutifully took the shots.

One of them, an image depicting demonstrators pressed up against the glass outside the governor’s office demanding Ohio reopen for business, was quickly taken before Bickel moved on for another angle.

But within hours, the picture had taken on a life of its own and was shared thousands of times. Commentators forecasted awards in Bickel’s future; others spliced his work up to make memes portraying the protesters as zombies; some even wished death and sickness on them.

“That part of it was hard for me, to be honest,” says Bickel. “I never want people to die, I never want people to get sick.”

Fully expect this photo by @joshuabickel to win an award once this is all over https://t.co/1y75FEBnnu — Zing Tsjeng (@misszing) April 15, 2020

Bickel lives in the local area, so he understands what people in Columbus are going through right now and their economic frustrations. Like much of the US, he says the pandemic has revealed underlying inequalities in the area.

Some people are relatively unaffected by the pandemic, able to keep their jobs, work from home and pay their rent. Others have watched their lives fall apart. In the two weeks preceding the photo, almost half a million people in the state filed for unemployment.

“Some people are really hurting right now. That’s an effect that is going to be felt long after this is over,” said Bickel.

As for the particular people in the photograph, Bickel is unsure: he had to stay separated from them to maintain social distancing protocol. “[Normally,] I like to sit down and talk with people if I can, to show a real story. This photo is like the total opposite of that – I was in a room, I [couldn’t] leave the room, they were outside,” he said.

Bickel tries to stay open-minded about the people he photographs, and understands that the job is to show exactly what is in front of you. That does not necessarily mean being nice, but it does mean being honest:

“They were basically saying like, ‘Being closed is hurting me economically and it’s not necessary’ … I try to stay open-minded. I sympathize with everybody. I understand that everybody’s experience [of this pandemic] is different,” he said.

He believes that is why the image has resonated so much: the glass separation in the photo is unique to this moment, but it also speaks to the metaphorical moment – everyone is going through the same thing, but experiences it in myriad ways.

“People are reacting to it this way because they see [the photo] from my perspective, but they are bringing their experience and their belief system into how they interpret the image, and they are symbolically seeing that divide,” he says.

He has been overwhelmed to find such sudden interest in a photo that, after he took it, he all but forgot about. “It’s funny, I didn’t even mark the photo as No 1 [when I uploaded it at work]. It was No 3,” he says.

Asked what he wants people to take away from the image, Bickel reminds us that the photo is simply an accurate depiction of a moment in time.

“Some part of me knows that I made this photograph, but another part knows that it doesn’t really belong to me now,” he said.