Photographer’s have taken their work many ways during the lockdown period, making new or even using the time to rework the old; I’ve seen street photography, doorstep portraits, and self-portraits aplenty. Along with documenting my everyday through my ongoing foto-diary, full of family scenes, Ivy’s development and PE with Joe, I’d felt very early on that I needed an outlet to explore how I was feeling. I wanted to immerse myself in my work in a new way, whilst adhering to what’s going on in the world. Having seen very few people for such a long duration, which quickly turned into months, I soon realised, this pandemic would take it’s toll on people’s health in more ways than the advertised symptoms. You’re talking a whole world of individuals going through the motions, as societies or whatever community you find yourself in adjust to what keeps being coined as ‘the new normal’. Nothing’s normal anymore.
I’m quite an outdoors person, I get cabin fever very easily. My calendar soon fills with dreams of daytrips, and photo-walks, but 2020 hits, and all of a sudden im chained down to the small radius of my home, with two small children, one barely out of the scarred womb, as a constant reminder of recent trauma. Like a lot of people, I think I started to yearn for the outdoors, sunlight, earth and growth, and planting sunflowers wasn’t enough… Through mixed emotions I felt like capturing family life through the lens, conjuring up the fear and anxieties I think I felt early on with Covid. From these thoughts merged a new project, and OUTSIDE/INSIDE was born.
This series of images, features my Son as my muse quite heavily. Through the child’s eye, I focussed my attention. Shot with still life in mind, I wanted to expand upon the simple interaction between sitter and photographer. Almost animal-cub in some, I wanted to release the wild inside my home, shelter, habitat… My idea of home-life changed a lot throughout lockdown, sometimes it gave solace, a place to hide away from the troubles of the outside world, warding off the terrors outside the front door. I feel very differently about the pandemic having gone through it, I feel targeted by the media, I see children around the country left to rot, as pubs and primark opens, their parks and open spaces are still out of bounds, locked away.
These are my lockdown portraits, narrative and artistic in fine form. They were made, and created from recurring thoughts and nightmares. They were entirely consensual, Sonny and I spoke in depth about what I wanted to achieve, and the look in his eyes as time went on says more than any blog post I could attempt.
There is a clinical feel to some of the images, some of them uncomfortable, almost unbearable to view. I played with a variety of light sources, varying times of the day, and as time passed, I often returned to the idea. The innocent child, bound by plastic, forced to breathe in the ‘good air’. Just Breathe, I kept repeating, in my head. As each week passed and my shutter blinked, open and shut.
