Does anyone else feel like they never really left lockdown? I've got that feeling that I remember as a child, when the whole class gets punished because one or two kids have been acting up. We have been so careful, but the novelty has definitely worn off. I'm trying to practise acceptance, but it's hard. This is my friend Anupam who lives in Washington DC. I caught up with him recently via Zoom. He told me how depressing it feels to have been a very active 60 something, to then find yourself considered vulnerable. He's been isolating at home since March.
Juan is a columbian artist. He works as a coder and programmer and also a teacher. Juan works for the government in Bogota. For the last four years he’s worked at a cultural organisation called Plataforma where he teaches coding and programming through artistic practise. This means that even though his students are staying at home, most of them have the IT equipment to keep on learning. This is not the case for most Colombians. When I photographed Juan, the future seemed very uncertain in Colombia. Juan was worried that the health care system was not great, and people were not taking lockdown seriously. He thought that the government was more concerned about the economy than people's health. That was the end of June when Colombia had lost just over 3000 to COVID19, now that number is 26,000.
Sally lives on her own, and when I made this portrait had already been social distancing at home for over three weeks. She works for the Deliveroo technical team, so working remotely is quite easy from a practical point of view. But Sally says she finds it really hard being stuck at home working alone all day because she misses the human contact.
Sally takes a half hour walk outside at the end of each day. At the weekend she has been walking around the deserted streets of the City of London.
However, in normal times Sally says she could easily spend 5 or 6 hours of the day outside at the weekend. That’s another thing she really misses. She loves swimming and was planning on taking a sabbatical this year to swim in all the lidos around the UK. That idea has been put on hold.
Adriana is an artist in Bogota, Colombia. On March 5th 2020 she had just put up a solo show in Chelsea, New York. People knew the virus was coming and visitor numbers were lower than normal. The exhibition had to close 10 days later. While she was in New York, Adriana’s boyfriend flew over from Spain, where the virus was much more prevalent. There was no quarantine at that time, but fortunately they were both fine. Adriana returned early to Colombia where they had locked down before the virus got out of control. They had a rule where the women could go out one day and the men the next. Then this was changed to odd or even numbers on an ID card. Adrian says that she feels being an artist has prepared her for this kind of situation. She is used to the uncertainty of not knowing where her income is coming from, and she knows how to make do.
Ane is from Denmark but has lived in the UK for 25 years. She has been a silversmith for 20 years. I photographed her via Zoom in her garden studio.
Ane lives in Hackney, East London, where she loves her community and feels a great solidarity with her neighbours. Even though there have been quite a lot of cases of COVID19 in her area, Ane feels very happy to be there. However, she is relieved that her 81 year old mother is in Denmark, where the situation appears to be much safer. If her mother was in the UK while she was in Denmark, Ane says she would be much more concerned.
As a maker, who works from her recently completed garden studio, Ane says that isolation and repetition are familiar to her. However, with three children at home since lockdown, she is busier than ever and can only carve out about 15 hours per week to work.
Ane says that she loves an artistic brief, a restriction, to aid her creativity. For 8 years she had a self-imposed a rule of only making work from one sheet of metal. Lockdown has created a new kind of restriction on her work. So, she has decided for the time-being that she will only make what she already knows.
This year Ane was hoping to have a solo exhibition to celebrate her 21st birthday of being a silversmith at a gallery which is also 21 years old. The exhibition has been cancelled. Nevertheless, whatever happens, Ane says she finds it essential for her own well-being that she keeps on making.
This is Luna in her bedroom in Portland, Oregon. Luna, who is 15, was studying abroad in Shikoku Prefecture, Japan when the pandemic started to get serious. She had been living there for 7 months and was really happy and enjoying the experience. However, when schools started to close, the Rotary Club, who had organised the visit, decided that the students should return to their home country.
Luna was really sad to have to leave her life Japan, and it has been really strange to come back to the US in lockdown. She cannot see her friends, school is all online and she’s at home with her family. All adventures have been put on hold for the time-being.
What a strange and unsettling time to be 39 weeks pregnant!
This is Laura, who quite rightly pointed out to me that as it’s her first child, she doesn’t really know for sure what things would have been like without COVID19.
She does realise that her midwives wouldn’t have been wearing masks during her check ups, that the check ups would have been at the GP’s surgery rather than a Children’s Centre and that her baby showers wouldn’t have been cancelled. Some of Laura’s pregnant friends have even found themselves having their prenatal check ups in the local football stadium.
Laura has been really missing seeing her close friends and family during these final weeks of her pregnancy. Hopefully, she won’t have to wait too long once the baby is born.
Like many of us now, Laura has been at home for about six weeks already. She stopped going to her work place a little early because she was feeling very anxious about people coming to work with coughs and sore throats. Her employer was very accommodating.
We wish you all the best Laura. Special thanks to Bonnie the dog who joined in the photoshoot at just the right moment!
Here’s something different for a change. A portrait via FaceTime of my friend, who is doing the opposite of social distancing. He’s working in a busy NHS hospital, surrounded by people with COVID19, helping to save lives.
I was really grateful that he spared a minute one morning for this picture, after putting on his PPE. It was definitely the most speedy portrait of this series so far. Most people who I phone at home have plenty of time on their hands. Not so a hospital consultant.
I was relieved to see that he had what looked like good protective gear, but he was virtually unrecognisable. It honestly felt like a call from another world. I can imagine it must feel very strange to have all your carers looking like this.
While many of us stay at home, and try our best not to spread the virus around, I wanted to share this counter-point image, and remember those who are facing this challenge head on every day.
This is Sally, the author of Girl with Dove, who I met via Zoom. She’s been social distancing on her canal boat since lock down.
I absolutely love the light on canal boats, so I was excited about how these pictures would work out. A few years back I did a whole series of portraits of canal dwellers around Oxford, in person. Even via video chat, I think that the boat light makes this image rather special. As a writer, Sally says she is quite self sufficient and has plenty to keep her busy. She’s finished the sequel to her first novel and is now working on the third one. She’s been teaching creative writing on line, which she is enjoying more than she expected. She loves walking and wild swimming and has been happy to be able to continue with those things.
One thing she does miss is sitting in cafes and writing. Sally says “Most writers are eaves droppers and anthropologists. It’s hard to do either of those when you are socially distancing.”
This is Stephen in his apartment in Chelsea, New York. Stephen works in publishing in the UN, and at the beginning of the crisis there was a lot of work rewriting everything because of COVID19. I spoke to him in June 2020 when New York was just reopening after the first wave. Stephen had been working from home since 17th March. His boyfriend lives 5 blocks away and they had been able to stay at each other’s places throughout the lockdown. Stephen had been able to walk every day. He was trying to support local restaurants by getting weekly takeouts. He knew then that the UN would not return to working in the office until some time in 2021. 2020 was the first year in history that there was no UN General Assembly.
Where were you when globalisation stood still? I wonder if this is a question we might start to ask ourselves. The lovely Ruth, pictured here, is pregnant in lockdown in London, while her partner and father of her child is in Sweden. With travel restrictions and quarantine rules, the pair are facing previously unimaginable logistics, to get dad to the UK for the birth. What was once a simple hop on a plane, is now a potentially complicated and unpredictable challenge.
Ruth says she feels lucky to have an interesting job as a radio producer and presenter, and be able to work from home. She started doing so when the government decided that pregnant women were vulnerable and needed to self isolate. So, about a week longer than most of us.
Unfortunately, this coincided exactly with when Ruth’s pregnancy was well established and her morning sickness waning. She was really looking forward to coming out to her colleagues about the forthcoming baby.
She’s noticed the progression of the pandemic during her pregnancy check ups. At her 12 week scan, Ruth says everyone in the waiting room had a partner with them. At her 20 week scan, everyone was on their own and social distancing from each other. Let’s hope that by the time the birth comes along, some more normality will have resumed.
Aparna is a fellow photographer, living near to New Dehli. We met over Instagram a few weeks ago (I’ve been busy, hence slow posting) and I am so grateful to her for volunteering to take part in this social distance portrait series - especially as she told me that she is quite self conscious in front of a camera. “Some of my friends won’t believe I’m doing this” she says.
Aparna lives alone, and says that normally she is not very social, so this social distancing thing comes naturally to her. However, she is happy to have got to know her neighbours better as a result of lock down.
In Gurgaon, where she lives, you are only allowed out to walk dogs or to make essential shopping trips. Aparna has two dogs, Yogi and Juju, but she can only take one of them for a walk at a time. So, she walks them one after the other. When she comes back the building guard makes sure she disinfects her hands.
Aparna works for Blink as a photography curator. The office was just expanding, from 10 to 20 people, before they all had to start working from home in mid March. She finds that she is working all the time, until late at night, which she doesn’t like.
She has only been out twice for groceries as the queues are so long and you have to go to lots of stores to find things. While out, she got stopped several times by the police who were checking that she was, in fact, doing essential shopping. She does get some online deliveries, but it’s hard to get a slot. As she’s not much of a cook, Aparna says she’s been eating a lot of eggs.
Aparna tells me, “There are lots of people for whom lockdown is extremely hard in India. Like migrant workers who got stuck in the city and couldn’t get home.”
When Merryn visited the NEC in Birmingham to pick up stock for her new toy business in February, she never imagined that two months later it would be a field hospital in the middle of a global pandemic. Nor did she expect that her business plan to sell toys around North Yorkshire markets, could have been thrown into such disarray. However, Merryn has picked up her business, Wistful Play, and used her IT skills to put it on-line. It launched a couple of weeks ago. Please look her up.
Merryn moved to her rural part of North Yorkshire 6 years ago. Lockdown has made her feel extremely happy with her choice. She says in many way lockdown life for her is not that different from normal life, apart from not being able to go to the shops.
Before all of this, Merryn sometimes wondered if she might like to live somewhere with a bit more going on. Now she realises how perfect her spot in the world is.
This is Bisan who I met via Skype. She is the sister of a friend of a doctor, who is a colleague of a friend of mine. This is how to find photo subjects!
Bisan lives in Gaza with her three brothers, all of whom are younger than her. She has been working from home since mid March. Bisan is a keen photographer and artist and many of the pictures on the wall behind her are her own.
There have been relatively few cases and deaths from COVID19 in Gaza, probably because it’s not as internationally connected as some parts of the world.
I loved talking with Bisan. Something that would have been unlikely to happen if it wasn’t for the pandemic.
This is Kawsar, the proprietor of one of my favourite Oxford restaurants, The Standard Indian. I photographed him via zoom and with the help of a very precariously balanced laptop!
Like restauranteurs all over the world, Kawsar is having to try and navigate the challenge of the current COVID19 lockdown. Once the government required that all restaurants closed, about three weeks ago now, The Standard tried a couple of nights of take away service and then decided that the safest thing for the community was to close down completely.
Luckily, he says, theirs is quite a modest operation. He owns the business with his brother, and they don’t have a huge staff, so they were able to be quite flexible when it came to closing.
Now Kawsar finds himself thinking about whether this is the time to put in place all the ideas he’s been thinking about over the years. He’s been considering changing their offering and the sourcing of goods, and wondering, if now isn’t the time to change things, when is?
How many entrepreneurs will be having similar ruminations right now? I can’t help wondering what the world is going to look like when everyone is allowed out again…
This is my lovely friend Kate Binnie @binnieyoga , doing her morning pyjama yoga. Not only is Kate a yoga teacher, but she is also an expert in palliativecare, a musictherapist, wonderful singer, and knows a lot about breath and breathlessness. She has all the skills needed in a pandemic lockdown to be honest.
In normal times Kate trains medics and works with people to help cope with symptoms which are beyond medical care, as well as doing academic research. Now, like many of us, she is social distancing with her family at home, teaching video classes and consulting remotely.
Check out some of her amazing work at Life of Breath or Breath Body Mind - Integration and if you have any suggestions for ways for Kate to get her ideas out there in the mainstream, where they are really needed, get in touch.
This is Tom. He’s a conductor. Basically, 2020 has been cancelled for him work wise, and will now, all being well, happen in 2021.
This was my first actual request for a video chat portrait. I think I’ll call it my first pandemic commission! Tom is working with Dan Norman, who I photographed earlier in this series, on production of St John’s Passion in Isolation. Look it up. It’s fantastic. This portrait was for the concert programme.
This is Josh, the arts editor of @newshour who interviewed me a few days ago about my social distance series of portraits. He’s been at home in Washington DC for about a month now, and interviewing lots of people about their different experiences of #lockdown.
I couldn’t resist but make a skype portrait of him, even though his Dell laptop had one of the notorious “NoseCams” we had fun propping it up and making the best image we could with it.
I am really enjoying the opportunity to connect with different people in this way. It’s a nice bit of light relief
This is Anne, an artist, who is one of many people who are having to social distance while living alone. When we spoke last week, it was about 7 days since the lock down in the UK. Then, she was still popping out to the shops once a day, otherwise it would all be too much, not to see anyone for days on end. I completely understand this sentiment.
Anne has had all her upcoming art projects in the community postponed, but is thankful that she is also working on a history MA, so can keep herself busy with her studies.
We had an amusing time placing her laptop in lots of different locations around her flat before finally settling on this kitchen portrait. The sound quality wasn’t great, so it was difficult for me to direct. I still think it’s lots of fun making portraits in this way. I keep wondering whether it will change how I practise in the real world once we are allowed out again…
Social Distancing is a huge challenge to all world-class opera singers like Dan Norman with theatres everywhere closed. This is Dan in his home office via jitsi.org. Dan says he’s had a surge of creativity since having to be at home, because lots of performances were postponed or cancelled. He’s working on ways to bring opera to a digital audience by helping separated singers to sing together. You can check out some examples on his You Tube channel “On Wenlock Edge”.
If you have tried to sing with people over the platforms that we are all becoming familiar with, you will know that, because of a delay, it isn’t possible. This is one of things that I am really missing about our new, socially isolated lives. But Dan is even helping out with amateurs like me! My choir, the jericho singers, has an open mic night every year, which we had all been preparing for. Dan is going to help some of us put our performance together at a distance.
This is Amelia, who I photographed a week ago, in her attic in Spain. Spain is ahead of the UK in terms of the spread of the virus, and was already well into its #lockdown by then. Amelia and her family had been following #socialdistancing rules for about a week.
Amelia has a five year old and a three year old, so the pace at home is fairly relentless. I was really grateful that her husband could take over for ten minutes and let us make this portrait. Amelia lives on the south coast of Spain and she said that all beaches are cordoned off with tape. Police cars are patrolling to ensure that people stay inside. They are still allowed to go out to the shops for food, but when they do, the numbers of shoppers are limited and everyone has to wear gloves.
Amelia’s mother-in-law had recently come to Spain to be near her grandchildren, but she is now isolated in her own apartment, five minutes away from them.
Amelia has a twin sister, who she is very close to. She was planning to visit Amelia in Spain soon. However, with no sign of an end to the crisis, she wonders when she will see her again.
Having cancer is scary at the best of times, but during a global pandemic, the worries are much greater. That’s one of the reasons I was so impressed with Liz, who agreed to make this #facetime portrait with me just two days before she went into Wycombe Hospital to have a mastectomy.
Liz had been self isolating already for 8 days before this picture and now she’s back home and being extra careful. Luckily, the operation was a success and she is recovering well. As Liz puts it “All I’ve got to do is avoid getting CV19. I can’t have beat BC to die of coronavirus!”
Liz has long been a social media user, and was even using it in its very early days in the mid 1990s. She says since the UK has been encouraging social distancing, social media has become much more busy and distracting. But, on the plus side, she is able to keep up her fitness much more than she would have done without the restrictions we face. Rather than having to miss her tae kwon do class for 2 to 3 months while she recovers from her operation, she can now watch on-line, like everyone else, and join in with the bits that she can do. And there’s on-line choir as well. Every cloud has a silver lining and all that…
This is Koen who I photographed almost a week ago, via video link, in his home office. Life has changed a lot in the UK since then. Koen was already social distancing and was very patient with my directions, moving him around his space, to help make this portrait.
Koen was trying to protect both his daughters and his grandchildren. His daughter had cancer earlier in the year and so he doesn’t want to put her at risk. He really misses seeing his grandchildren regularly, like he used to.
Koen is quite accustomed to this kind of work life though, because he’s a freelance consultant. He used to be either working from home or travelling. Obviously, the travelling has now gone, but the working from home feels very familiar.
Here’s another social distance portrait. They are happening a bit more slowly now I’m also running a #homeschool for three. Although, that’s nothing compared to what our amazing nhs workers are doing, so I’m definitely not complaining.
This is Caspar Henderson who had already limited his social contact before the lockdown started in the UK.
Caspar is working on two new books at the moment. One is about the transformation to the zero carbon economy. He had lots of meetings and field trips set up over coming months and they’ve all had to be postponed. As a writer he’s quite used to social isolation, but he was looking forward to getting out into the world for a change. Now that’s been taken away for the time being.
Making a portrait via skype and with a language barrier is quite a challenge! This is Matilde who lives in Emilia Romagna, Italy. She hasn’t seen any friends since 22nd February, but she and her family are coronavirus free.
Every day Matilde has on-line lessons, but she says that there are often problems with the wifi and the bandwidth when everyone is trying to use the connection at the same time.
Jeb has already been Social Distancing for about a month. This is because he is in a vulnerable group and also, as a self-professed twitterholic, has been reading about the severity of the Corona Crisis for quite some time.
Jeb is 68 and retired. He used to be a freelance programmer, so says that he would often spend lots of time at home, alone, in front of a computer screen. So, this lifestyle is not too unfamiliar to him. In those days a call with another programmer would often turn into an hour long chat. Any work issue would be quickly resolved, but then the human connection would be the thing to be enjoyed.
For my part I am really enjoying directing people around their rooms for these portraits. Jeb had a tripod for his phone which was a great help!
This is Jan Stanley who has been self isolating in Denver, Colorado for 11 days now. She's a leadership coach and found out a student at one of her workshops was COVID19 positive.
Jan had five leadership gatherings planned for April and May. They have all been cancelled and now she is having to work out new ways to work on line. We had such a great chat. I can highly recommend connecting with people this way right now.
This is Abi on day one of social distancing. At the start of the week she was on a course about the Art of Social Engagement at UAL but that obviously got curtailed and now she’s at home with her 8 year old getting used to the new reality.
We are all going to have to learn a lot of new skills over coming months and in particular we are going to have to work together in new ways. I am learning how to direct people from afar to make portraits. In this case we had Abi’s lovely son holding the iPad while I told him, up a bit, down a bit, left a bit, right a bit, and then I photographed my screen with my leica. I’m not nearly as in control as normal, but this time I was really delighted with the result.
This is Ricky. I met her last night over Face Time even though she lives in Australia. It was so wonderful to chat. The picture was quite pixelated and the sound quite distorted, but it was so amazing to be able to make this connection. Ricky has been bed bound for most of the past 20 years and at home for the past 3 years. So she knows quite a lot about social distance and isolation. She lives with one flatmate. He’s a student who does some regular chores for her. Twice a day carers come to help out as well. Obviously, coronavirus makes Ricky feel anxious, but also she is appreciating the fact that now that so much more is happening virtually, she is able to participate like everyone else. While lots of us feel that our world is shrinking, hers is expanding. Ricky really empathises with people who are having to get used to self isolation but she also worries that once the immediate crisis is over, this renewed surge in virtual activity will also disappear.
This is Abbie. She was told to self isolate after a school exchange trip to Spain. She isn’t sick but she is missing her friends. Hopefully she will be back at school soon. At least for the short term.
Marta is an Italian student who I met on skype yesterday for a self isolation portrait. She has Covid19. She is in Bergamo the Italian epicentre of the pandemic. She had been social distancing in Padua where she is at university for about two weeks before deciding to travel home to her family in Bergamo. She met with some friends ten days ago, and they were all well, but now three of them have the virus. “That was a mistake” she told me. She’s now isolated at home with her three siblings and her parents. Her mum is a nurse but has managed to stay well so far. She told me that in Bergamo anyone over seventy is being turned away from hospital and asked to stay at home. They only have hospital beds for the under seventies.
While at home Marta is still able to work on her dissertation. She has a fever and a cough but it’s not too bad. Next week she will graduate on-line from university.
This conversation really brought home to me again the importance of social distancing now We can all save lives this way.
Teresa is 81. She lives on her own in Edinburgh and is not looking forward to having to social distance. She was hoping to spend Easter with her daughter and grandchildren but knows that probably shouldn’t happen now. It was great to get her using face time and to connect in this way. We will all be needing to do more of this over the months to come, and it’s great to feel that while some parts of our lives are shrinking, others can expand.
This is Julianne who has been social distancing for 4 days. She is an academic and is thinking of her close colleague’s elderly relative and wants to protect them. Julianne lives alone which comes with its challenges. She is missing her regular gym visits but can still get out for early runs. Last night she was having her first Skype dinner party with friends. “The advantage is we can all eat exactly what we want!” she says.