In March of 2020 I was home from college, living in my parent’s basement. Like most others, I assumed that quarantine would be brief. However, as the severity of COVID-19 became apparent, I realized quarantine would not be the two week ‘staycation’ I initially believed it would be. Depressed, frightened, and unemployed, I felt uncreative and stunted by the space I was occupying and, as a result, I didn’t take a single photo for months.
During this time, I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir in which she discusses feeling grief and loss in the mundane moments of her life. She writes, “...confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred…” In reading this, the words took on new meaning and it became clear to me that what I assumed was unremarkable (the pandemic, the isolation, the basement) was actually quite remarkable and, in fact, worthy of its own focus in a photographic project. With this, I embarked on From the Basement with limited subjects, equipment, and space.
A study of negative space, both literally and figuratively, I attempted to see how the spaces we occupied during this pandemic reflect upon us. Both a love letter and a break up text to my parent’s basement bedroom, From the Basement explores self portraiture, an area of photography that challenged me, while also allowing me to continue developing my style of highly saturated and emotive images. In this project, I attempted to marry the saturated with the muted in order to showcase my experience of pandemic life. Our new normal is lonely, tedious, and yet full of color.
