stronger than ever
On the 23rd March 2020, Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally put the UK into lockdown following the fast spread of SARS-CoV-2, a virus which causes the potentially fatal disease Covid-19. In his televised address, Johnson stated that Britain would come out of this “stronger than ever,” a statement which echoed Teresa May’s “Strong and Stable” election sloganeering three years earlier. By this time, the UK population had been subjected to multiple slogans including “take back control” and “get Brexit done” and has seemingly bought into these sentiments. These photographs reflect my experience of lockdown and the acute anxiety I experienced trying to juggle the wonderful, yet challenging, terrain of being a new parent, trying to do a PhD and a change in living arrangements whilst the whole world felt like it was going to collapse. The stronger than ever statement seems an even greater fiction seven months later. At the time of writing this text, we are still waiting to come out of the other side of the Coronavirus pandemic. Wales, where I live, is currently in its second “fire-breaker” lockdown and last night Westminster announced a further one-month lockdown in England starting this coming week. Without sight of an end to this crisis, I have finally had a chance to reflect back on the photographs I took during Lockdown 1.0. The process of making these photographs was remedial and part of my process of trying to deal with my mental health issues during the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.