Is it just me or are people crossing
the road more than they were before? Maybe
I'm paranoid, is that a symptom, been
hard to keep track of all the news. I see
Black humans keep dying though, a mystery
apparently, unrelated of course
to the fact PPE rules changed daily.
An image in response to the poetry written for this project
The making of this work started with a basic plan, a flowchart written on an A4 sheet of paper. Once everything’s mapped out you’re often painfully aware of how much ground there actually is to cover and that was certainly the case here.
How do you cover loss, grief, loneliness, shielding, contracting COVID, looking after COVID patients, losing your job, worrying about your friends and family, worrying about the world, health inequalities due to racism, systemic racism and more in ‘3 - 5 images’, which was the brief we’d been given?
The first plan
Well you can’t can you! My wildly ambitious original proposal crashed into the unyielding realities of the time we had to complete the work and the quixotic scope of my plan was abruptly reshaped into something more manageable and achievable in the timeframe we had to work with. The dispassionate wisdom of Andrew Jackson was again crucial here, pointing out the potential range of this work if done comprehensively and how it might be sensible to consider it as a related series of smaller projects to continue working on beyond the current deadline.
Even with this advice in mind the scope of the project remained daunting. My original plan was to contrast the experience of my mother, who’d been sheltering during the first lockdown, with my own as a front line health worker. I’d discussed this with my mom before proposing the project and she’d kindly agreed to work with me, so the plan was for her to respond to some questions about her experiences of sheltering alone during the first few months of the pandemic and I would use these reflections and some writing of my own to inform the images I would subsequently make.
Once I’d been selected for the project I passed the questions to her and she started gathering her thoughts while I started writing some rudimentary poetry that captured some of my instinctive responses to events of these last few months. The main aim here was just to get thoughts out of my head onto the page and see if any themes or ideas resonated for further exploration visually.
6 questions given to my mother to elicit her experiences about sheltering at home during the first months of the pandemic
This process of writing turned out to be somewhat unsettling both for my mother and myself, forced as we were to confront the true extent of the personal toll the pandemic had had on us individually and as a family. What was interesting though were the similarities in our reflections despite our very different experiences. Ideas such as grief for a way of life lost, fear of adapting to the ‘new normal’ and of other things, uncertainty of how to interpret one’s perception of increased risk as a Black person and determination to preserve some freedoms now seemingly under threat shone through. Many of these themes had been anticipated when planning the work and the task now of course was to try and translate some of these ideas into pictures.
“I fear having to be admitted to hospital for any reason. I live with conditions that can be detrimental, but now COVID has been added to the mix of things I have to be careful about…
If I became an inpatient, in a COVID-heightened environment, I fear that I would not come out of hospital.”
An image in response to mother’s words above, articulating her fears about contracting COVID-19
Meanwhile of course, the pandemic continued apace. My region introduced stricter COVID restrictions as the project deadline closed in and with very little shooting having taken place. This forced me to change plans and I now had to pivot to a more restricted approach with less travelling, less visits to my mother’s house simply for the purpose of making photographs and a decision to stay very close to my own home as much as possible. This meant having to reconsider how I would put together a coherent series of 3 to 5 images despite abandoning some locations I’d considered integral to telling the story.
Thankfully due to the preparation that had already been done, some flexibility on shooting days and photographic luck, I was able to hit enough of the touchpoints despite these last minute changes. In this case, the planning and synthesising of ideas took up by far the majority of time and effort invested in the work, with actual camera time being only a small fraction of the overall activity.
This is possibly the most useful lesson arising from this project, that the time spent planning, writing, conceptualising and reflecting on the themes pays itself back exponentially when it comes to making the pictures. It’s surely possible to work the other way round, to start out by creating the images and then slowly piece them together into a coherent narrative, but I’d argue that is a much less efficient and more time-consuming way to work (although possibly involves less agonising). That’s not to criticise different approaches, and I’ve certainly worked that way myself in the past, but rather a realisation for me that I’d gained a better understanding of my own process as a result of being given this opportunity by ReFramed and have been able to build on foundations laid during my MA studies.
I’ve spent some time gathering my thoughts since completing this work and found the wise words of my old tutor Wendy McMurdo swirling around in my head (as ever!).
The thing that she always told me that I find myself going back to repeatedly is the need to simply persist, to keep making work and to remain committed to the process of being creative. Another astute idea of hers, reflected in this interview, is of staying faithful to subjects that interest you. As a result of this COVID work, and following on from a recent chat I had with the Photography Ethics Centre, I’ve had some new ideas about revisiting elements of my Reaching Out Into The Dark (ROITD) project and reconsidering loneliness in the context of the pandemic. It’s clearly been a time where many of us have been confronted by isolation, loneliness and disconnection from previously nurturing social networks and I’m looking forward to picking up this subject again with a fresh perspective moving forward.
So on that note I’ll leave you with another song. This one can be found on the ROITD project playlist and is where the title for the project came from.
Till next time…