SAFE INSIDE: a photographic journal of isolation in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic

5.25” x 7.75” x 1”
Archival inkjet prints on metallic paper, with modified drum leaf binding.

This book is based on text and photographs created during March 2020, while I was the artist-in-residence at the Gushul Studio in Blairmore, Alberta, Canada. The complete text and images are below the images of the completed book.

What do we do when we can’t go outside? When it’s too risky, too dangerous, too uncertain, when all around us is fear? We stay home and look at the world through the windows. We stay home and shelter from a threat we can’t see but know is out there, growing, spreading, more each day. We hope that we are safe within our own walls. We stay inside and look out at the empty streets, remembering what normal looked like just a short time ago, which suddenly feels like a long time ago.

And inside, I begin to notice the small things: I notice frost on the windows. I notice how my view of the surrounding houses is obscured through it. I notice that same frost melting in the afternoon sun, turning to condensation, transforming the world seen through it into pointillist abstraction. I notice the way the world looks through the mesh screen on the storm door: divided up into a grid of squares, pixilated without pixels. I notice each fingerprint on the glass, each bug pausing for a moment before disappearing from sight.

I become restless, but there’s nowhere to go. Eventually, I get in the car. The enclosed space is an extension of inside, from which I can look out safely, through the windows. I drive aimlessly, in broad circles, marveling at the way ordinary things like trees and fields are transformed through rivulets of melting snow on the windshield. I drive until it grows dark and there is no longer anything to be seen out the window. 

In the days that follow, I watch the light change, watch the colors grow vibrant and then dim as the sun rises and sets. I watch the snow fall, then settle, then melt. I marvel at the frost on the window glass, glittering like constellations of stars in the daytime sky. I look out each window each day to see if anything has changed, if anything is the same. Over time, looking out upon the same houses and trees and icy streets begins to provide a sense of comfort and familiarity. 

For this is not a place of familiarity; this is not home: I came here for a time in order to make art. While here, the world began to unravel. I still pick up my camera, but why? From inside a house that is not my house, I look out on a neighborhood that is not my neighborhood, at a mountain that is not the flat landscape of home, at a place that began as strange but becomes more known each day I look out the windows. 

And so I photograph. I photograph to keep myself grounded, to maintain a connection to things that feel more tangible than news headlines that change hourly, to know that there remains something more substantial than my fears. I photograph to remind myself that I am still here, at least for the time being… and that I need to keep living, keep finding meaning, even if that means that for now, life is lived inside, or be viewed from the window.  

And looking out the window, I watch the weather, watch how the snows that lasted earlier melt quickly now, watch the sun gain strength, watch winter slowly transform into spring. I watch and photograph these incremental changes. I watch and wait and hope for the day when risk of disease is likewise diminishing like the melting snow, when life can begin to return to normal, when we can all once again safely go outside and look back through our windows at the place where we sheltered in the storm.