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?

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!).

DACS member, Wendy McMurdo talks to DACS about her work and artistic processes. A photographer and filmmaker, Wendy speaks about the impact of computers and ...

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…

Directed by James Mooney Belong is taken from the new album Recycle Love. Featuring TriniCassette, God Zombie, Visionz and Fresh. Edited by Joe Carey https:/...

Phew, that's been a mad few months hasn't it! Writing now feels indulgent, almost as if we aren't still gripped by a pandemic, surrounded by the rubble of life as we knew it. Yet we must persist, stumbling forward through the murk, blindly hoping that better days lie ahead though we can’t yet see them.

I'm wondering how many of us have been challenged to reconsider our priorities in recent months. I certainly have, forced to examine so many best laid plans, exploded in moments by unforeseen virulence. How resilient are your dreams when faced with unprecedented obstacles? This is a question I'm still figuring out while trying to reconcile the unavoidable need to shift and adapt to changing circumstances.

One way to view the chaos of 2020 is as a bringer of opportunity (stay with me!), as surely the people who will weather the COVID storm most successfully are those who’ve been able to pivot most easily, to identify and hold on to the most crucial things and willingly let go of everything else, moving forward into the unknown with an optimistic lightness.

Since last writing in May I've been obliged to switch focus from the project I was developing then, following the award of a bursary by the Midlands-based photographic network ReFramed to make some work that examines the experience of COVID-19 by Black and Asian communities. There’s clearly a lot to cover there, and with only two months to submit I’ll be working diligently to distill all the potential themes and content down to a coherent small body of work. A different challenge to anything I've done previously, but an exciting one for sure. I'll be documenting the progress of this work here over the next few weeks, with a view to discussing some of the underlying themes and providing some background to the process.

There have been too many tragedies arising from the last few months, so much suffering, it's difficult to make sense of it all. One of the most striking things for me has been the many contrasts and conflicts that have arisen, provoked by an unseen but deadly enemy, that has unmasked a number of fault lines in our society and way of life. The haves and have nots, the disproportionate devastation wrought by the virus in communities of colour, the shielders and the minimum wage front line workers...in each pocket of society, forced into isolation from each other by the virus, there is a different story to tell.

The world is unrecognisable to all of us now and the future is uncertain. Amidst this of course, some have been confronted by the traumatic reiteration of violent systemic racism and embedded social injustice. This seems to overshadow everything for me currently, an horrific exclamation mark on an already terrible year, amplifying the pain of various COVID-related hurts. The effects of racism are an inescapable burden, whose weight varies from day to day but from which you are never relieved. Lately it's sunk right down into the bones of everything, burning and aching and causing a nagging restlessness.

One of the things I've never reconciled is the apparent indifference and ignorance of some, who have remained blissfully unaware that life is fundamentally different for others in ways that have been graphically illustrated in recent times. A benefit of privilege I suppose, but it's evident that injustice can only really survive in an environment of indifference, it can only thrive where blissful ignorance does also. One of the consequences of the pain awoken by recent events is a stark realisation that I can't be party to the indifference any more, being a quiet bystander is just not tenable any longer. I have to do something, say something, be part of solutions rather than a silent sufferer and co-conspirator. It's way past time.

Being an active force for change requires focus, understanding of one’s sphere of influence and a plan. The first tentative steps in my plan will be making this work for ReFramed. There's been a big focus in some quarters on the fact that people from Black and Asian communities have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19. There's been a lot of speculation, theorising and hand-wringing, as there has been about other perturbing facts of the last few months. One thing that has been unsurprisingly lacking though is any sense of urgency to take tangibly effective action to address this issue. Reports are commissioned, risks assessments are mandated but what comes next? Again, we are victims of the paralysis of indifference and of the unfortunate fact that nobody seems able to muster the energy to concentrate on an issue for more than a moment if it isn't directly and continuously affecting them personally. The capacity to empathise and thus to step forward as an active advocate or ally seems in short supply. So energy then and determination are needed, to overwhelm indifference and demand attention for long enough for something, anything to really change.

The Government announces another commission to investigate the mysteries of ethnic disparities.

What's this got to do with photography Justin? Well, visual media has played a critical role in all of the issues discussed above. What did you think when yet another photograph of an unfortunate front line worker dead from COVID flashed up on the news? What message was portrayed when Boris Johnson broadcasted from his isolation looking clearly unwell? How different would the last few months have been if nobody had been there to record as a policeman knelt on George Floyd’s neck?

Photography has had a pivotal role in shaping the perceptions of minority communities in the minds of a supposedly enlightened Western society almost since the inception of the medium. So much of this indoctrination is now so deeply embedded in our understanding of the world it is incredibly difficult to unpick, and certainly impossible to do so if one is indifferent to, or willingly ignorant of, the power of imagery and its role as a fundamental tool in the wielding of power by one group over another. It's incumbent on us then to question how imagery is used, to challenge it when its use clearly has malign intent and seek to recruit the power of photography for a more positive purpose, that of bringing to light elements of life that have been previously and repeatedly misrepresented or simply unseen. By doing so, one hopes to contribute to a cumulative effort to reframe prevailing narratives and bring more reality and balance to public discourse about sensitive issues.

It’s clear that we are living through a time of individual and collective reckoning, where previously unquestioned practice is being looked at from a more informed standpoint and being shown to be in fact highly questionable (see Magnum Photos). It’s incumbent on every practitioner in a visual medium to reflect on what their own role is in the bigger picture.

Actually Making It Happen