D O W N
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Documentar y Photogr aphy S tu d e n ts Uni ver si ty of South Wal es.
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P H O T O G R A P H S BY STUDENTS OF THE D O C U M E N T A R Y
P H O T O G R A P H Y
U N I V E R S I T Y O F S O U T H WA L E S , C A R D I F F.
C O U R S E
Introduction.
In December 2019 the health authorities in China reported a cluster of
viral pneumonia cases of an unknown cause in Wuhan province. In January 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, with 7,820 cases confirmed globally, affecting 19 countries. On the 11th of March the WHO declared a global pandemic and as of June 2020, more than 8 million cases of Covid 19 have been reported in more than 188 countries, resulting in more than 445,000 deaths. The pandemic has caused global social and economic disruption and triggered the largest global recession since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. It has led to the cancellation and shutdown of sporting, religious, political and cultural events and widespread supply shortages which have been exacerbated by ‘panic buying’. It has also impacted schools and universities, with closures affecting approximately 98.5 percent of the world’s student population. On Tuesday the 17th of March our university, the University of South Wales in Cardiff, closed its doors to staff and students. Like many of our colleagues within the UK photography education sector, we were faced with the challenge of maintaining an effective learning environment as remote learning became the ‘new normal’. Whilst the global scale of tragedy dwarfed our concerns, losing access to subject-matter due to ‘Lockdown’- was going to be a challenge. This was particularly true for our students. Having access to the lives of others and ‘bearing witness’ is a fundamental part of a documentary practice. Being forced to stay at home and contemplate one’s ‘self’ is not necessarily part of our student’s instincts. The work published here in, ‘Lockdown’, is just a small selection of some of our student’s responses to these unprecedented circumstances. Paul Reas. Documentary Photography Course Leader.
‘Unmasked’. by Curtis Hughes
My Mother is a ‘Front Line’ worker, who grew up in Brighton, one of the first UK cities to be hit by Covid 19. She is 57 and has been working most of her working life in the health sector. Since moving from Brighton to the Sussex countryside she has found solace in a quieter life and often unwinds by spending time in her lovingly well-maintained garden. This project tries to pay testament to all the Key Workers, such as my mother, who are selflessly helping those who are less fortunate than themselves in these trying times and often at the cost of a stable, safe family environment for themselves.
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During the Covid-19 lockdown I return to my family home to isolate with my mother and grandmother. Collaboratively making photographs, we document our experience of staying home, and inject play into documenting the domestic. Mother Nature is an enquiry into women’s instinctual nature, our need to be in the presence of one another in times of difficulty and fear, and our dependence on the natural world for our sanity. I am always taken by how deeply some women like to dig in the earth, and my mother and my grandmother have always kept a beautiful garden. They poke with blackened fingers into the soil and tuck roots into the earth like they once tucked me into bed. During a global crisis our small garden has become our Utopia, and nothing has been more relished than the one daily walk. Picturing these walks, and the garden of my family home, I contemplate nature as representative of the woman’s wild psyche. The term Mother Nature refers to Greco-Roman personification of nature, by which the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature are embodied in the form of the mother. In our garden, I watch my mother and grandmother give and take life, moving with the exhalations of the wild nature. In a similar way that a garden is susceptible to infestations and droughts, at present human beings face an invasion. However, despite such disasters, the garden is a reminder that regrowth is always possible, and that the world will heal. For the time being my mother, my grandmother and I hold each other close and engage with each other and with our creativity through the making of these photographs.
‘Mother Nature.’ by Sanne Rietveld.
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I am in Denmark. I was with my friends having a glass of wine and preparing to get back to Cardiff. My mother calls to tells me that my uncle is ill in hospital. My uncle Benny was the one who got me into photography. The next morning I sailed to the hospital. The trip lasted for two hours, I was sitting outside and the drizzling rain created a wet surface on top of my jacket. My mother and father picked me up by the harbour and we drove to the hospital. When we arrived the hospital was disturbingly clean. My uncle was lying in the bed with tubes wrapped around his body. This made me anxious, not knowing whether his life was artificially kept alive. Was he alive just because he was breathing, or did he actually have thoughts in his head? In my pocket I had a letter to him, one that I had composed on the two-hour ferry trip. It was one of those letters where you try to get everything off your chest. “Hello Benny, I wanted to write to you, just pass on information about my situation and express my gratitude. However, Inever got to do this. My mother called me, said you had been taken ill, so now I am writing this damn thing. I have been in Denmark a week or so, met a girl in Copenhagen. My course is challenging. They have a giant darkroom, we can develop film for free. They have a library, the biggest I have ever seen with hundreds of photobooks. This is one of the places where I spent most of my time. You would love it here. In a month from now, me and the others from Blitzkrieg are releasing our first book. I feel like I am living a double life at the moment, Copenhagen and Wales, however I am trying to make it work. I am as restless as I always am. Recently I have been working on a book dummy for a personal project as well, I’ll show it to you when I see you. It is pictures from Wales, Denmark, and Greenland. You have to go there! It is amazing, and I think it is impossible to make a photograph that does the beauty and mundanity of the nature justice. There was sunlight for three months straight when I was there, so you could just go on hikes without worrying about getting back before sunset. My father called and said that you are in a coma. Is that a death bed? How long does a death bed last? People don’t pass away. They die. What passes away is no longer present, but we are only alive because of our memories. I still have those memories.” My uncle Benny died that night. I was in the chapel when I discovered this. When I lifted the camera to make a picture, only then I was able to stop crying. Did the fucking camera make me stop feeling?
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‘Ouroboros.’ by Johan Buch.
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‘Days Like These, With You’. By Teifi Davies.
It’s a confusing time at the moment for my Grandmother. She is living during a period of transition, it’s difficult. She is stuck in something that has yet to find a cure. She has Alzheimer’s. This work is about both my Grandmother and myself. As I journey through getting to know her better, she deals with the loss of my Grandfather and her memory. I suppose there is some irony in the fact that I am getting to know someone who is slowly drifting further away from me. It is particularly strange for her, being without the person who she spent over 60 years being married to. Although she moved into a nursing home over six months ago, she is still dependent on the idea that she will return home soon. My Grandmother is someone who relied on the societies norms, going to the shop or the Church are routine events she misses and are no longer things she is able to do alone or in fact at all. Her world has been picked up and moved into the confinement of her four walled residential room. This is where we spent most of our time making the project. Throughout the process of making this body of work we have both enjoyed each other’s company. Growing up, I had never spent time like this with her there was always an emotional distance. My process has been slow. I just simply observed her. It has become a realisation that the time spent is slowly deteriorating and those who we love won’t be with us forever. With this work I have in somwways made something I can hold onto.
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‘Lookdown Lockdown’. by Alex Carnie.
Alex Carnie photographs the new daily rituals that ‘lockdown’ has enforced upon us all, the frequent washing of hands, the sanitising of shopping , the increased home deliveries etc. Repurposing a wildlife trail camera from its normal role of capturing animals through motion detection, it now records and monitors the individuals within a home. The camera has autonomy, photographing anything and anyone who comes into its sight. It controls the space and sees everything. Not only documenting how ordinary routines have had to adapt in the current circumstances but also evidencing whether or not the rules of the lockdown are followed. How many times has everyone left the house today? Have they washed their hands to reduce the spread of the virus? These questions are answered by the camera and all these actions are witnessed and made permanent. From the camera’s position of height and power, it enacts a state of control on all those below.
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‘Common Ground’. by Iga Koncka. Once upon a time a young girl from a foreign country decided to try a new life in a kingdom famous for its green fields and red dragons. The girl has lived almost all her life in a small village near a small town. The community in which she grew up was rather poor, most of the people in the village were either farmers or physical workers. However, the girl has always felt that she did not belong to the world of serious matters and serious problems of simple people from her village. To get away from what she was overwhelmed with, she usually reached for books. The books have become a new, wonderful world. The wonders described in them fuelled her mind and imagination. Inspired by miraculous stories she started to create art. She has always believed in freedom in art. Expressing herself creatively made her happy, but it also brought a lot of inner peace. She tried to nurture the creativity and freedom of the child. She considered children to be fascinating creatures. She appreciated wisdom in them and the simplicity of the spirit, which is usually successively bottled-up by adults. In the previously mentioned land of greenery and dragons the girl met a group of children who, like her, came from a small village near a small town. They quickly became friends with each other. The girl and the children explored the boundaries of imagination and creativity. She even taught them how to use a camera - a machine to take pictures. The children, excited after a little training started to take the first pictures in their lives. Without much knowledge and skill, they started to build their own world. Talking about dreams of their sleeping and dreams of their future, they celebrated the power of imagination together. The photographic documentation of thoughts became a regular practice. Suddenly and unhappily, the gloomy times of plague have come all over the world. For the sake of safety, everyone had to stay home and wait patiently these unhappy days. Our girl also stayed at home, but this did not stop her from making art. The girl was inspired by nightmares, paintings and the terrible and strange stories she read in those terrible and strange times. She thought intensely about her little friends from a small village. She was wondering about the line between childhood and adulthood. She came to the conclusion that in fact, all our boundaries are in our heads. It does not matter if we are locked in a hall, in a room or at home. After all these visual experiments, which took place regardless of the place, the girl realised that imagination is the limit in the context of art creation. The most important point was to realise that, despite of age, it is imagination and creativity that are the common ground of all of us.
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‘New Land’. b y E v a Fa l k - D r a k e.
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The Covid-19 pandemic led to an enforced lockdown in the United Kingdom, which only allowed the public to go outside for an hour of exercise and to perform essential jobs. During my daily walk I began to visit my local green space; 2km² of privately-owned land by Worthing and Hill Barn golf course. Under government regulations the golf course shut and became a new area of land that the public began to repurpose for their own use. People walked their dogs there, used it as a cycle path and accessed the benefits of being in an open green space. It was important for me to capture this landscape: Firstly, because it was the only time the public could completely utilise this space and will therefore become part of Worthing’s social history. Secondly, because going there has helped my mental health during this time. When you’re at the golf courses you can see for miles, right out over all of Worthing, onto the sea and round the coastline. For me this is especially important for putting life and my worries into perspective. The aim of New Land is to capture the peace and tranquillity this green space has provided for the local community whilst acknowledging how this very particular landscape, that was originally cultivated for private use, has been repurposed. This touches upon other complex issues of the private ownership of English landscape. I am particularly interested in how, despite the new restrictions around Government Guidelines around social distancing, it has, ironi-cally, enabled private spaces to become accessible.
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‘Work By Now’. by Tomas Pacovsky.
Work by Now was inspired by the period of 2020 during which a global pandemic of the coronavirus spread across the globe. Once thought of as something that can hardly affect any of us, it soon became quite clear it would change all of our lives. Unprecedented restrictions were imposed in order to protect human lives. Millions across the globe were forced to stay home and abandon their current lifestyles and also plans for the near and distant future. Future, as such, became more uncertain than ever before. It seems that unlike the many other crises we had experienced, this one really stripped away the superficial and the unnecessary. By forcing us to literally shut down the world, it also opened new possibilities and opportunities. However, just like any other crises, it also took a toll – personal, societal and economical. The first one is the main inspiration for this book. My project is a personal response to the pandemic. It is mainly concerned with the psychological effects lockdown and isolation had on me and possibly many others. Interestingly, to a certain extent, this was a universal experience. Being isolated in a confined space. More than ever before experiencing the magnitude of the outside world and nature. Feelings lost, anxious and uncertain. Witnessing tension in ourselves and subsequently in our own limited surroundings. Also, the feelings of hope, reconciliation and new prospects for the future. However, the work itself is not only about the pandemic, it is about something more. It is about now. So what is Work by Now for you?
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‘Flux’. by Chloe Nicholls.
‘Flux’ is a body of work which looks at my younger brother’s adaptation to being in isola-tion due to Coronavirus. With already fragile mental health, Mason has struggled to find ways of coping with his negative emotions whilst being stuck inside. No longer able to play football, we began finding other ways of keeping him preoccupied. Creative outlets proved to be what he needs to manage his feelings, allowing us to establish a dialogue with each other so that we could attempt to help him. The resulting photographs identify what Mason considers home, looking at his everyday routines, as well as the ways he’s been trying to escape emotions that can sometimes overwhelming for him. Collages and writings from my brother allow him to open up more, giving him a strong voice that appeals to the emotional side of the narrative. Moments of play are contrasted by mo-ments of thought; the space between them allowing viewers to consider their own feelings at this time of global confusion.
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‘Tomorrow Never Really Comes’. by Tanya McGeever.
Depression is difficult to define. It doesn’t have a physical presence, you can’t hold it, but it can take a hold of you. It’s not a “black dog” either. I don’t like that metaphor. Dogs don’t impose themselves on humans. We adopt them, nurture them and in return they bring us joy, companionship as well as unconditional love. Depression doesn’t require an invitation. It seeks you out like a parasite, taking up residency in your head and then sucks away all your happiness. Before you know it, you’ve been hijacked you out of the driver’s seat of your life, reducing you to nothing in a grey world where one day blends into another, and tomorrow never really comes. Just how do you go about photographing something that’s invisible? The following images are a series of self-portraits made as a means of trying to express and understand the complex emotions surrounding mental illness. This pictorial was devised during a period of self-isolation which has enabled me to dig deep into those uncomfortable feelings and draw them to the surface in an attempt to try and make sense of them. I have deliberately chosen to photograph myself nude because there is a transparency and vulnerability in nude photographs (but also a strength). I hope these photographs will shed some light on the daily struggles of people who have to deal with mental illness.
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