Christopher and his wife Liz spent “Lockdown” in Dubai. At the peak period, they spent almost 3 weeks in their Villa, only being able to leave with a Police permit. These were only issued for supermarket visits every 3 days, or for urgent medical visits.
This was an intensely productive period. Christopher spent hours in the darkroom printing work from “Crazy Street” and “So, what do Kiwi’s eat for breakfast” for later exhibition.
He also created two bodies of work in response to the pandemic.
One of the byproducts of Lockdown was a disconnection from family. Tools like Skype and Zoom became the only way to stay connected.
It just seemed appropriate to use my Father’s Spectra Polaroid camera to capture the experience. I used the last of the film (Polaroid have discontinued this film type), and then I used the last of the Fuji FP100C on my Mamiya. It wasn’t as though the end of the world was coming, but this did seem to match a huge change in the world.
I wanted to capture the mundane aspects of lockdown in both images and in the text which was written at the time.
Six of these images were selected for display in Silvergrain Classic’s Docupan exhibition (see https://silvergrainclassics.com/en/2020/05/the-docupan-project/).