LIVING PLACES /
#covidobscura
A project to record our places of self-isolation in one-week blocks of time.
As we entered a period of lockdown to stem the spread of the Covid19 virus, I invited photographers, artists, or anyone with an old mechanical camera and a piece of black and white photographic paper to photograph their space using a continuous exposure of one week. The photographs form a unique record of our shared experience of isolation.
A selection of these photographs are in the gallery above. For a more comprenshive picture see #covidobscura on Instagram. Individual photographer credits in captions. All rights of the individual artists reserved.
#covidobscura is a participatory extention to a series of one-week exposure photographs of personal spaces in response to a period of boredom, anxiety and the rise of social media made in 2011-12. It is called Living Spaces. You can view that porfolio here.
“Through use of an adapted paper negative process, Living Places takes a wry look at the present era of ubiquitous surveillance, social networking by literally recording everything that has happened within the participant’s living space for periods of a week or more in a single photographic frame. Volunteers were sought and chosen through an open-call online, the process is explained and the subjects collaborate in the installation of the camera in their chosen personal space, normally a bedroom. The camera is then left, shutter open over an agreed timeframe.
The resulting images give cause to reflect on the apparent need to record our lives in comprehensive detail and the corresponding trend of making this record of banal, yet often highly personal information available for public consumption, via various social networking platforms. These photographs seek, in abstracted form to document and to an extent subvert this confessional trend, in which the public and private are increasingly entangled; the intimate commonplace.” (Statement - williamarnold.net 2012)