Documenting Community During the COVID-19 Pandemic on Film
A long overdue post back from the 2020 COVID era – I certainly wasn’t the only photographer who came across this idea and had fun with it. To photograph people in our community from the CDC social distancing guidelines. Observe the boundary placed before us and make something with it.
Looking back, these photographs feel less like a photography project and more like a small visual record of a unique moment in time. During a period when gatherings, celebrations, and everyday interactions suddenly disappeared, front porches became a place where people could still connect with friends, neighbors, and their community while maintaining a safe distance.
What drew me to the project was the challenge of creating meaningful portraits within the limitations of social distancing. Instead of bringing people into carefully selected locations, the portrait environment was already there. Each home, porch, yard, and driveway became part of the story, revealing something about the people who lived there and how they were experiencing that moment.
Shooting the series on film felt especially appropriate. The slower pace encouraged a more deliberate approach to each portrait, and the resulting negatives and instant prints have become tangible artifacts from an unusual chapter in our shared history. Years later, these images serve as a reminder of resilience, adaptability, and the ways communities found connection when traditional forms of gathering were temporarily out of reach.
Shot on a few formats – the bulk of what is shown is shot on a Pentax 6×7 medium format body with the 105/2.4 lens; there’s a couple shot on the Mamiya 645 1000s. All black and white images are shot on Kodak TriX 400 film. I hand processed the negatives at home and scanned these myself using the Epson V500 flatbed scanner. The color shots were shot on the long discontinued and Fuji Fp-100c peel-a-part film, shot using the Intrepid 4×5 Field Camera and Nikkor 180/5.6 and a Polaroid back.
I had quite a bit of difficulty with the instant peel-a-part film and the Intrepid Camera. For me it’s far too janky to be trust worthy in the field – the Polaroid back is bulky and the camera isn’t stable enough to support it all. The ground glass “locking” mechanism isn’t strong enough to lock things in effectively. Additionally lining up the shot was difficult as the peel-a-part film isn’t the same format as the 4×5 camera so the coverage is different.
