On March 15, 2020 I returned to Toronto from three weeks in Paris and Morocco. At 12pm sharp the night before I flew out of Paris, the city went into total lockdown. The numbers of COVID-19 cases were staggering and on the upswing, people were dying everywhere, and even though I was locked up in my small hotel room in the 14th arrondissement, I did venture out occasionally for a walk and a nice meal. Back in Canada, the Government was still taking a cautious, wait-and-see approach by allowing international flights to return. Immediately upon touching down on Canadian soil, I was ordered to go into quarantine and isolation at home for two weeks, which seemed fair and reasonable given the uncertainty and sharp rise in cases throughout the world.
On April 1st, 2020 after my quarantine ended, I defied the yet-to-be-announced “stay at home” policy and launched a personal photo project doing porch portraits of ordinary people in extraordinary times, calling it Porchraits. I put a call out to my large mailing list and started receiving inquiries almost immediately. The idea was to give people back something they could hold onto so that future generations could see and understand what the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was like. I asked my subjects to simply write a word on a board describing how they are feeling at the time they were being photographed. Then I directed them as I normally would from a distance.
What I was seeing was the full gambit of human emotion in their written messages of hope, desperation, loneliness, fear, positivity and humour.. exactly how human beings process a new situation when it is suddenly thrust upon them. Folks were grateful to be a part of a fun project, to have a unique experience either with their families, or alone outside in their own environment, while maintaining the required social distancing with me, the photographer.
For the entire month of April, I went out to people’s homes and apartments, stood outside and photographed them from a safe distance, something that as a portrait photographer I must say, went completely against the norms of how I work, of usually keeping a close distance to my subjects. This time I was confined to shooting my subjects from a minimum of 2 metres apart. I even started doing long distance photo shoots with people through live apps such as FaceTime. People were calling me to book who I hadn’t heard from in 15 years. The ball was obviously rolling.
At one point, about mid-April there was some flack on photographers in other parts of the country being told by an organization of photographers no less, to stop their own porch projects as it was deemed not an essential service. Many abided and followed suit, but I did not. I kept my project going for reasons which are more personal rather than collective, a choice I have no regrets about now. And all my subjects stood by me, agreeing that it was a worthy thing to do and should not be forced shut by a few naysayers.
By the end of April, 2020 I decided to stop the project. There was no need to continue on at this point. I had achieved what I had initially set out to accomplish. I helped bring some happiness into people’s otherwise mundane daily routines in this new reality which we all live in now, and had created some much-needed awareness for the importance and beauty of a well-executed portrait, a genre of photography that has taken a beating and has been hard hit the last ten years or so with a lack of demand for the services of established portrait photographers.
A picture tells a story, and is worth a thousand words… so they say. So let this series and others like it be a testament to the goodwill of the people agreeing to being photographed and their absolute resolve to stay positive and try to enjoy the moment.. in whatever way is humanly possible. Shine on, friends!
