Nearly a year ago, I began the process of remotely photographing individuals over FaceTime and video chat in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so I sought to create a collective document and alternate archive of the moment in time, focusing on voices of youth and particularly perspectives of young people of colour and queer youth. The project is called ISO, which in name evokes isolation, the acronyms ‘i seek out’ and ‘in search of’, as well as the iso setting of a camera. I called both close friends and strangers and invited them to be part of the project. The resulting photographs present a portrait of isolation, searching, gratitude, bitterness, domestic space, youth and pandemic. Each image in the project is photographed remotely, confronting the restraints of the pandemic which rendered people physically apart from each other. I invited each photographed subject to submit a journal entry, sharing anything they wanted to write in that moment in time. The project features numerous photographs of at least twenty seven individuals, and with the accompanying written texts in their own words, define an emotional nexus among the participants in quarantine and form a snapshot of things laid bare by time. A majority of the participants in the project are part of the Asian community and I would love to contribute some of their entries to this endeavour. The submitted video is slideshow of still images and text from the project.
