Turkey has spent more than six months in some sort of partial lockdown.
I’ve been lucky enough to miss large chunks of it. This lockdown– with weekends at home and a 9pm curfew– began in December, when I was already in California. I left for another month in the US in late April, the day before our partial lockdown became a full one. And when I return from the US, there will still be some sort of lockdown in place, though no one can say for how long.
It wears away at you. Honestly I’ve found the curfew much more disruptive than the weekend lockdowns. The curfew cuts my day off at the feet (and when it briefly became a 7pm curfew, at the knees) and makes it almost impossible to move around the city as I’d like to.
The weekend lock-ins have their own challenges, though. Sometimes I am more than content to soak in those two days of forced quiet, especially when my stalker kitty comes by to spend the day snoozing on the couch with me or when I tackle some sort of home reorganization project. Other weekends, though, I am a tangle of energy that has no outlet, metaphorically bouncing off of my four walls, desperate for a good in-person conversation or a bike ride.
One weekend in February, I felt an unquenchable urge to MAKE something, to feed my creativity. But painting or drawing required a patience I did not feel like I had, and it’s not my primary form of artistic output anyway– I am a photographer. I wanted to take pictures.
And so, I did. Armed with my little analog Olympus Mju and its primitive self-timer, I shot an entire roll of monochrome self-portraits, loosely defined. What makes something a self-portrait? That was the hardest part of this little project to execute. How to take 36 varied self-portraits with a little analog camera and a couple of mirrors? The one subject I photograph most rarely is myself. I experimented, playing with reflections and shadows, mirrors and windows.
Then, I rewound the roll, and spent the next five days of freedom photographing double exposures of the wide world I was free to wander. I spent Monday through Friday walking until my fingers and toes went numb, somehow squeezing a life outside into five small days. In one week, I captured the bifurcated nature of our strange and endless lockdown: sometimes inside, sometimes out.
It’s shocking to me that I shot this in February and now, in May, these lockdowns continue. What will it feel like to stay out after 9pm? When will my weekends be open and free again? I don’t want to continue this particular project, but if the weekend lockdowns continue into June, I might have to. There has to be some outlet when the world is confined to the walls of my apartment, even if it’s only for two days a week. When the world is split in two, photographing the juxtapositions is something that makes it all feel unified again.
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