How do you photograph the Covid time? Its easy to fall in to cliches, and many of the things one could photograph, are not really quintessential of the time, and would not really work, like nearly empty buses, people at windows, or a piper in the street, and hospitals… And how do you photograph something that can be deadly, but you can not see?
For me, the answer is narrative, and as a predominantly narrative and social photographer this is my approach here. (Also informed by Richard Demarco’s ‘Road’.) My personal experience unavoidably influences here too, and this is perhaps also right. I contracted pneumonia in the last part of 2019, and recovery took many months. For me the last two pictures are particularly poignant, the last one the most personally so (see ‘Behind the picture’ ). But the two end pictures non the less, have something about the human spirit in the face of adversity about them, mixed in with that poignancy. It was a ‘strange spring’.
Carl, June 27th 2020