Staying Home Together, F-Stop Magazine

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Staying Home Together, F-Stop Magazine

August 1st, 2020 by fstop

Patricio Cassinoni “Quarantine, March 25 2020”

In this historic time, F-Stop Magazine and dotART decided to co-publish an exhibition of photography based on the theme, Staying Home Together. Our aim is to explore the current shared global experience from photographers portraying their experience: to highlight images from new routines in our lives, environments, and everyday life. The constantly evolving context of ‘everyday life’ is a term-in-flux in July of 2020, yet after recently viewing images from the 1918 influenza pandemic I was struck by how many similarities are echoed over 100 years ago. It is this similar experience that the most successful photographs are ingrained with, and those photographs are the ones which draw me in. It is that journey into a photograph that keeps me looking at photography. The historical documentation and the shared experience, that’s what makes photography such a powerful storytelling medium.

So much of what has happened to all of us in 2020 is shared experience. How can we not have similar thoughts, feelings, fears, about what is taking place or lies ahead? So many things that are similar across cities, states, countries and continents disclose the universal experience the world is sharing at this point in time. Suffering is universal. Joy is universal. Boredom is universal, hope…anxiety…curiosity…reaction to injustice…as well as expressions of support for fairness, justness, wokeness and equality. The exploration and spirit of community and images which express values and ideals of many shared cultures, religions, and humans the world over are shown. Millions of people are staying at home for the health and safety of ourselves, our loved ones and our communities.

The photos here express a breadth of artistic responses to the pandemic. The psychological effect of the pandemic is evident in the captured scenes of people in isolation, even if they are together as a family or a group. Much of the photographic work deals with a theme of identity in liminal spaces. How will we now define normality? What will come after the time we currently inhabit? What does life feel like now? What will it be like tomorrow? When trauma like this strikes a society, especially a global society, it does not just strike a group of individuals who happen to live in the same place. It exposes how connected we are, and want to be. It is compassion and simply looking out for each other that will support all of us, the arts, and our health, in the days to come.

Exhibitions like this have the power to give prominence to the talents of photographers who take the basic premise of where we find ourselves and offer a deeper understanding of a global, human narrative; not solely due to the nature of documenting the evidence of their lives, but because of their individual experience. There are many different ways to show how the condition of now has impacted each person individually, personally and creatively; and I applaud those here who dare to strike out and find new ground.

– Cary Benbow, writer and contributor to F-Stop Magazine

Check out the full issue of F-Stop here.

Neil Kramer “Quarantine, Day 55: The Beauty Salon Is Open”

Poppy Matthews

Simone Zimmermann “Together Alone”

Suzanne Koett “Day 5”

Sandra Hernandez “Every day I tell myself that I’m fine. Actually I am: I‘m confined in a safe environment, I have work to do and I‘m not lacking anything. Why, then, are there days when I feel so fragile, as if a crack is beginning to develop within me? I think mental stress begins to manifest itself in unsuspected ways. Today‘s shower has felt like a warm hug. “Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me About Crying in the Shower? What a fair fine place to cry. What a rare place to let go And know that no one hears —“ ~Ray Bradbury”

Carlos Becerra “Self Quarantined (2020)”

Location: World Wide Web Type: Exhibition

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