The COVID 19 pandemic is forcing many of us to find creative ways to do our jobs. Photographers are no exception. By mid-March, most of my commissioned work was being postponed and the three exhibitions I had on show in Oxford were, one by one, being closed to the public.
As a portrait photographer, I depend upon meeting others to do my work. To make it worse, I was in the middle of a project with the objective of getting people who disagreed with each other to hug. Suddenly, I found myself in a world where people couldn’t even hug their friends, never mind their enemies.
Luckily, I remembered one of the project ideas which was lurking in my “someday” spreadsheet. I had long thought that it would be interesting to experiment with photographing people far away via Skype. With people social distancing around the world, and using video calls as their main form of communication, I realised I had the perfect opportunity to experiment.
My portraits aim to celebrate the under-celebrated. I want to make images of people which tell their special and often untold stories. While we are all rightly praising the key workers who are getting us through this crisis, those who are isolating at home are also playing a valuable part. I wanted to document some of their stories at this extraordinary time.
I started by asking a good friend of mine, who is on immunosuppressants, and who had started to self-isolate early. She happily agreed to take part. After that, I put out a call on Twitter and Instagram and started to gather volunteers from around the world: There was a friend’s 81 year old mum who was living alone in Edinburgh, and didn’t really know how to use FaceTime until I talked her through it; people in Spain and Italy, who were ahead of us on the pandemic curve; even a woman in Australia who has been bed-bound for 20 years and is enjoying the fact that so much has moved on line during the global lockdown. The volunteers keep coming.
Despite the constraints, I am enjoying this new way of working. I’m used to meeting people who I don’t know, and working with them to put them at ease and create a portrait. However, I do not normally have to share so much of my process with the sitter. For these social distance portraits, I really do need to collaborate with the subject. I get them to show me around their spaces. Then, I make a quick assessment of the light, and ask them to place their device in a location that gives me a view that I’m happy with. At first, I made close up portraits, but then I decided that the images were more interesting with more of the environment included. I found that this way the portraits looked different from the mugshots that we are all so familiar with on our daily Zoom meetings.
Light is always something that I need to think about, but now I need to take into account bandwidth and webcam capabilities as I compose my shots.
People are often surprised when I get out my camera to photograph the screen rather than taking a screen shot. I find that the artefacts that I get as a result of making the image like this make it much more interesting. Even though these images are made using digital layer upon digital layer, I love the fact that the black border of the screen looks a little like the black border of an old negative.
It feels important to be documenting this peculiar period of history. I am also finding the process in itself is worthwhile. Just spending some time talking to people while they are isolated and having a bit of fun making a picture, is food for the soul.
