A DIFFERENT KIND OF BLUE

The Covid lockdown of 2020 led to some unique and unexpected changes to the environment. Between 25 March and 21 June, commercial jets disappeared from the sky, roads emptied of almost all traffic, and the usual hum of urban life fell away. The world was cast into an uncanny stillness. Colours and sounds of the natural world suddenly seemed more vivid, more lucid, and the skies of East London took on an intensity and subtlety I had never noticed before. For forty-nine days—the length of the first and strictest lockdown in England—I took one photograph each day on 35mm film of the sky above my house in Leytonstone, normally a space dominated by the constant flightpath from City Airport.

In retrospect, this project feels like a socially-distanced fever dream, a suspended moment in time where the ordinary became extraordinary. The skies seem to hold painterly colour and form reminiscent of William Eggleston’s At Zenith series, where everyday skies are elevated through his refined form of spontaneous observation. At the same time, there is a quiet echo of Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents, where clouds and sky serve as metaphors for emotion and thought, creating a dialogue between the external world and inner experience. A Different Kind of Blue remains caught in that temporal loop, a record of light and time in a city that had paused. The photographs from that period seem to reveal colours and moods that are intensified, curious, and fleeting, reflecting the strange beauty of enforced isolation.

Chromogenic prints, 2020

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