This blog for the Royal Photographic Society explores teaching through photographic practice during lockdown.

During the first lockdown of March, April and May 2020, I recognised that we were facing a level of global anxiety and isolation unlike anything in recent memory. Drawing on my own experience of PTSD and trauma, I initiated an online photographic workshop for women photographers around the world, using image-making as a way to navigate uncertainty, connection and reflection. This blog for the Royal Photographic Society explores that process — teaching by example through lived experience.

In a time when physical contact was removed, the internet became a vital space for shared experience, creativity and emotional support.

On this page are some of my Conversation Starters as I came to call the photographs I posted online to a group of female photographers around the world.

 

 

I knew the techniques that I have relied on throughout my life with photography, could help other people. To start with, making a suggestion to my own Facebook Friends and a couple of groups. The intention was simply to keep our minds off what was happening in our real world by sharing our photographs with each other — either those we had taken on that day or delving through our archives and albums — and then talking about them in the comments.

The idea came to the attention of Angela Nicholson, the founder of the Facebook group SheClicks (a group for over 7000 female photographers from around the world) who immediately asked me, if I would consider running daily posts within the group. I agreed, it helped me too at a time when the majority of us were confined to our houses, unless we had the qualifications and skills of a key worker.

There was no planning involved, particularly at the beginning… I sat down with my calendar in front of me and started scribbling. 86 days later, the members’ daily posts prompted by my Conversation Starters as I called them, fill files with over 900 A4 pages.

It is important to say that I am not a psychologist or trained counsellor. Over the three months I posted Conversation Starters that I felt would help the group simply by distracting us from the moment we were forced to live in. Drawing on my various uses of photography from over the years and by recognising exactly what stage I was going through myself, which I was also privately diarising with Visual Metaphors as I call them*, meant that I could gear my daily posts and Conversation Starters accordingly.

I took up a routine that people could then rely on. I posted the next day’s photograph and Conversation Starter quite late at night (GMT time) and I myself answered, liked, or commented on nearly every post throughout the waking hours, as did many other people, with photographs of their own.

Someone in the world was always waking up to new posts; someone in the world was always posting and in that way we shared a camaraderie that I have not known before and am unlikely to experience in the same way again.

Having helped to diffuse our anxieties by keeping our minds away from what was happening, I changed the emphasis of the posts to enable us to face the reality in small manageable bites. There were those that shared their anger; anxiety; powerlessness and bewilderment. Others said very little, going with the flow, encouraged by a lack of rules and regulations in an impromptu daily photographic challenge.

The aim was for us to come out the other side with the best result possible. Surviving, yes of course, but more than that. My hope is that we could reach a level of acceptance, in preparation for the unknown of our ‘new normal’ state.

 

Further context and related work

My original blog for the Royal Photographic Society can be read here

The ideas developed during this period also informed ‘86 Days in Lockdown With Photography®’, where visual metaphors became a way of processing experience. A selection from this work forms part of the Brooklyn Sketchbook Project

Two of these photographs were later included in the USA juried exhibition ‘A Ballad of Our Changing World’

Further work and publications can be found at: www.withphotography.co.uk