A documentary photo project about the Covid pandemic
Lonely in Piazza San Marco, Venice, Italy
Sometimes, experiments and accidents can take you down a new path. However, the destination is seldom clear at the start. The decisions you take at each turn determine if the journey is to be fruitful or not. Such was the case in the making of my upcoming book, Scenes from a World in Lockdown, a photobook about the Covid19 pandemic and its effect on our lives. For what started first as a discovery led to certain decisions that turned the discovery into an experiment, which ultimately ended up being the most important photographic, documentary, and artistic project that I have done to date.
As the lockdown began last year, I faced the inability to fulfill my passion and obsession, take photographs outside, and document the world as I see it. Consequently, I began to look for alternative ways to scratch my photographic itch. It was during that time that I discovered the many public webcams that stream on the Internet, and I turned their streams into a window to the world.
I started to shoot images of these streams on TV. Its peculiar screen and resolution became artistic tools that helped craft stories of solitude and of a world unseen. As time went on, I realized that I had stumbled upon a very personal approach to document and photograph the effect of the pandemic on our lives; emotional stories of emptiness, desertion of urban places, and the renewed beauty of nature without human pollution. While we will surpass this challenge as a human race, this work has created a singular journalistic and artistic archive of this event that will stay with us long after the terrible pandemic is over.
My first photobook of this work is about to be released. And starting now, I will share some of my favorite pictures from that book and their behind-the-scenes stories with you on this blog.
This first picture I am sharing is from the famous Piazza San Marco in the lovely city of #Venice, Italy, which is visited by millions of tourists in a typical year but was then deserted. I will be writing much more about this and other images from Venice and Italy in later posts, but in many ways, this image symbolizes the loneliness that the pandemic brought to our lives. What an incredible sight to see the piazza empty like this!
In closing this rather long post, I hope that this work adds to our memory of this terrible Covid pandemic in a different but approachable way and that you find the work interesting. And I'd love for you to share it with others if you like it.
In Italiano:
Questa prima foto che condivido è della famosa Piazza San Marco nella bella città di #Venezia, in Italia, che è visitata da milioni di turisti in un anno tipo ma ora era deserta. Scriverò molto di più su questa e altre immagini da Venezia e dall'Italia nei post successivi, ma in molti modi questa immagine simboleggia la solitudine che la pandemia ha portato nelle nostre vite. Che spettacolo incredibile vedere la piazza vuota così!