Our Bullet Lives Blossom As They Race Towards The Wall
"Our Bullet Lives Blossom As They Race Towards The Wall"
A few days before the UK went into Covid 19 lockdown, I took the car to a neighbouring district of London to try and pick up some shopping. As I drove, Louis Armstrong’s ‘What A Wonderful World’ came on the radio, and at that moment I found myself passing by three people wearing protective masks and gloves: a mother and child waiting at a bus stop, and a teenager on a bike performing a peddle wheelie as he rode by in the other direction, I turned to my wife to comment and she had tears in her eyes. It was one of the most surreal and cinematic experiences of my life, and I knew then that I had to try and document these strange days.
Since that moment I began to take my camera with me each time I headed out for my daily exercise, and along the way – while always maintaining a safe distance – I found myself taking pictures of the people and the paraphernalia that felt so symbolic of the Covid-19 pandemic. I wanted the images to give a sense of moving through the city, as if viewed from a vehicle (as I did on that initial day). Brief snatches of life amid a crisis.
As time has passed I have become less concerned with documenting the social experience of the virus and more in finding visual metaphors in both natural and man-made environments, images that seem to say something about how this experience is challenging and changing us as humans, and about my own personal (mental and spiritual) struggles. This is something I’ve been trying to capture ever since I moved to an area of London that lies somewhere between the smog-choked industrial wastelands of the North Circular and the leafy forests beyond, a liminal space that somehow represents my feelings of uncertainty, trapped somewhere in the purgatory of routine that separates suffocation and freedom.
Watching human behaviours change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, has been at once inspiring and deeply unsettling. The effects of this crisis will be felt for generations, and I hope the lessons we learn stay with us in more carefree days to come.