Covid Compliance

This photograph is a part of my most recent series, “Covid Compliance.” When the pandemic struck, and the ability to go out and photograph the world was no longer an option, I struggled in my identity as a photographer. “Am I still a photographer when I have no one to photograph anymore?” I asked myself. The change was sudden and tumultuous. We were forced into such intimate isolation with ourselves. This photo was birthed out of Trump’s commentary about ingesting bleach paired with those feelings of loneliness, isolation, and confusion that I was so intimately left with. Every photo in this series was taken in the confines of my basement and uses me as both the subject and photographer. The intimacy of the loneliness in the pandemic catalyzed in me a revival in my artistic practice. The confines of the loneliness expanded my imagination, and demanded I find new ways to tell stories. In this photograph, I use painted clouds to communicate the distance I felt from the outside world, the dead flowers to indicate the grim realities of our mortality during the pandemic, and the manipulated clock to communicate how disorienting time became in isolation. I created images to feel as dystopian and as surreal as reality felt during that time.

Done