Traits of 2020: the 12 months in pictures
In photography, as everywhere, 2020 was a very strange year. Thousands of exhibitions have been canceled and interrupted, major events such as the Paris Photo Art Fair and the Les Rencontres d & # 39; Arles Festival have been canceled and numerous picture makers and institutions have been forced to sleep. And while Covid was a big story, it was difficult to portray in photographs. Though spectacular at first, the empty streets and face masks soon became all too familiar, and on top of that, Covid just meant more time at home for most people, where it looked like an average Sunday.
Even so, this strange time will (hopefully) seem remarkable in the future. So it's great that some brave photographers have documented them – often out of love or need, with no commission or income. Chris Dorley-Brown took to the deserted streets of London during the initial lockdown and posted his photos on Instagram. Among the few who capture the eerie atmosphere of the time, his recordings deserve to end up in an archive.
Elsewhere, publications and institutions commissioned image makers with the PHotoEspaña Festival, which, for example, joined forces with the Enaire Foundation to present time at a standstill: Photographic report of a prison sentence. This project gathered work from 42 photographers for an online exhibition that will also be a book. It has been broken down into four categories that summarize the Covid experience: absence (empty beaches / streets), urgency (medical teams), waiting (domestic scenes), and reveries (poetic shots).
Above: Health care team performing swab and antibody tests at Corona's First Baptist Church in Queens, New York on May 24, 2020, © deedee deGelia; Above: Photo of a man standing at his gate, Somolu, Lagos, Nigeria, April 17, 2020, © Omotayo Tajudeen
Le Monde's M magazine dealt with the “restriction” in a more bizarre way and commissioned 16 photographers to deal with it. Photographers chosen included big names such as Jürgen Teller, Mario Sorrenti, Wolfgang Tillmans, Paolo Roversi and Jack Davison, but not women, and the supplement received backlash when it was released in April. "How can you not hold them responsible for the invisibility of female photographers' work?" asked the feminist group La Part Des Femmes. It was an early warning that we weren't necessarily all together – an issue to be repeated.