Time to reflect

2020: an image a day - a halfway reflection
On 1 January this year, I re-started a photography project that I had last undertaken in earnest in 2013. I resolved to take a photograph a day for every day of 2020. After a few warm-up entries (In both Oxford and Northern Ireland) in late December 2019,  I took my first 2020 entry on 1 January on a New Year’s Day walk with friends. Little did we know then what 2020 would bring. My photographs do not document the pandemic or the lockdown. Indeed, looking at the entries since 1 January you might almost not know it had happened. Almost. This isn’t a social commentary, it’s not even a personal diary. It’s a reflection. And there is as much in what the images don’t show, as in what they do represent. 
 
Dark days and nature
There have been dark days in these last 6 months. Literally and figuratively. Personal and global. At times lockdown angst and Weltschmerz felt overwhelming and painful. But there is always an image of the day to be found even if it means a late night, “emergency blip” of something nearby and domestic(?!)
 
The beauty of blip is the art of looking that it creates in you. In 2013 I completed my first 365 project. That process instilled in me both the desire and the ability always to look at the world around me. What I learned was that the most beautiful, remarkable things are often closer, and smaller, and more mundane than we realise: Sticks with a coating of bright yellow lichen, frost in the cracks of the road that evokes a dragon’s eye, the pattern on a tree stump, the flowering of a nearby magnolia tree, a ripple in the river, or a view of blue sky through garden plants. 
 
Things out of place
Things have felt out of place since March. I no longer work in my office in central Oxford but in my spare room on a camping table that rattles with every key stroke. My son calls this room “Mummy’s work” and our dining room is “Daddy’s work”. The last “normal image” in the series is a birthday party on 15 March. Unimaginable now. The ball pool, bouncy castle, and pass the parcel all out of place for the way we now have to live.
 
In photography things being out of place often creates the best kind of images: a discarded chair, a tree wearing glasses, little lost things, a badger's footprint on a bottle, a star in the grass, and a flying bear.
 
Little things of beauty. 
Throughout lockdown – and even before that – it’s been the little things of beauty, found through this project, that most invigorate and sustain me. My family and I are fortunate in so many ways. We have a garden, secure and supportive employment, we had the virus but it was (relatively) mild, our families are well and safe, we have access to parks and wildlife, our time is limited but there is (just) enough of it. I have the luxury therefore of building this project and collating these images: a dandelion clock, the weave of a jumper, lines on a fence, our garden tap, holes in a green leaf driftwood in miniature, an ornate letterbox.

None of us knows what the next 6 months will bring. I only hope there will be more images of nature, beauty, and things joyfully out of place, than of darkness and disruption.

HCB