‘Live, [Photograph] and Learn’
In the world of Digital Placeshaping, images reign and shapeshift ceaselessly. It is difficult to reflect on the ‘new normal’ of our current virtual and physically-distant lives without a consideration of photographs and lens-based arts. Even exhibitions in every virtual form unfold from the meticulous photographic archives of institutions and galleries. As we dash across social channels, our conversations are mediated through visual imagery that acts as evidence, activism and memory.
Documentary photographers continue to go where we cannot with on-the-ground coverage of the unfolding crisis. They capture human scenes from hospitals, care homes, local streets, private houses and airports that are then shared and re-shared via online platforms with velocity. Photographers have also documented the startling and sudden absence of humans that has swept across public arenas and changed Futurecity’s work as we’ve known it, such as when The New York Times ran an interactive photo diary called ‘The Great Empty’depicting iconic gathering spaces hushed across the continents.
These documentary photographs in the mass media have catalysed creative projects, movements and discussions, generating energetic dialogue at a time of physical stasis. Photographic cooperative Magnum has organised initiatives like Quarantine Conversations between photographers via social media and Diary of a Pandemic: a weekly selection of photographic responses from social restriction on a given theme such as ‘quiet’. And the recent Aperture Foundation Summer Open brought the shortcomings of mass media depictions to the fore, asking open call entrants to respond to the question: How can photographs provide information at a moment when ideas about truth and power have been disrupted?
Print and digital photographs have responded to the needs and vulnerabilities of communities. On April 20, online print sale Prints for Food opened for purchases, for which all profits will aid the Trussell Trust’s efforts to support UK food banks. Pictures for Elmhurst, an online photography sale in New York, raised over $1.3 million in support for the overwhelmed Elmhurst Hospital in Queens last month. These efforts of goodwill extend between photographers as well. LensCulture editors recently published a list of resources for financial support and courses for photographers on their website.
And for the photographer at home, and even the new photographers coping with crisis through documentation, organisations have rallied to provide opportunities for daily creation and reflection. Shutter Hub has featured open call submissions on online exhibitions themed ‘Working from Home’ and ‘Everyday Delight’. Historic England launched #PicturingLockdown, a campaign for records of lockdown life. COVID windows, a community-based project, gathers views from windows onto the world and posts them daily to Instagram.
One can hope that the network of creation and reflection through photographs cultivated with renewed urgency during the coronavirus crisis will endure. Artist An-My Lê has said of her photographs: ‘I think the strength of it comes from what I can suggest that was not in the photograph at first—what was not in what I saw’.1 As we’re experiencing varying degrees of change on a global scale, An-My Lê’s words resonate with current photographies and creations. How will these framed images of our experiences transform with the bend and hindsight of time?
What will we learn from what we lived?
1An-My Lê, ‘Interview with Art21, 2007’ in Documentary, Whitechapel Gallery (London 2013)
Image credits: Justine Kurland. Contribution to the successful Pictures for Elmhurst photographic sale to raise money for Elmhurst Hospital in New York. See here.