Quarantine Diaries

New Blog Hu Dis! Hello my precious potato farmers, tis I, the queen of abandoning this blog and resurfacing it as my emotional state allows. As of this writing, Sean and I have been married for 122 days, 75 of which have been in quarantine.

Out of those 75, I spent a consecutive 20 of them shooting a self-portrait project that you can see on my portfolio called X Days Later. Today i thought i’d write more about the process of creating the project and show you guys some outtakes.

The first few weeks of quarantine were… I guess they were okay. All our income streams dried up (we had quite a number of them), but thankfully we have an emergency fund and some savings to lean on. While we aren’t totally destitute, we could definitely use a fresh pay check right about now.

The financial and economic stressors are the primary source of anxiety in our small household. The only non-essential purchase I have made since getting married in January was Stardew Valley on the Switch – $14.99 in exchange for HOURS AND HOURS OF BLESSEDLY MINDLESS FARMING. I cannot bring myself to consider Animal Crossing – that’s one week’s worth of groceries, man. Every week kinda counts right now.

Not being able to contribute to society in a meaningful way is also a source of unrest. The news coming out of every screen in this house for the first few weeks was how bad this thing was hitting frontliners, and how there are people out there risking their lives and their families lives to help society ride this thing into submission. Sure we artists are cute and all, and the work of artists can be a source of comfort to an ailing public, but the “real work” was being done on the front lines.

All my insecurities about my peers in photography started raging as well – some of them are out there taking risks, doing significant journalistic work, telling meaningful, life-changing, politically charged, important important stories with their images. The Rapplers and the WaPos and the CNNs and the 24 Orases are our only windows to the outside right now; their work is tangibly valuable.

And here I am. I shoot weddings for profit. I try to be a feminist while doing it. Sometimes, I succeed. Hi.

Feeling useless in tandem with not really having “financial evidence” of your usefulness is a dreadful combination. Of course, there are a lot of incorrect insinuations here, the most glaring being that our worth is somehow found in how much people are willing to pay for our output. This is capitalism’s voice. I have an easier time digging myself out of this hole because I watched Saturday morning cartoons, and know that money doesn’t tell you jack squat about worth.

The other insinuation is that because we can’t make a direct contribution to the situation at hand, that our work is not valid or not worth doing. This is insecurity’s voice. I have a much harder time disbelieving this, because that voice is my voice, and I like my voice. This is also not a new struggle. Certainly, all artists have wrestled with this at least once in their careers – it’s just highlighted in the current crisis.

What makes work worth doing, if it isn’t cash and it isn’t an immediate contribution to society?

I started this project not really knowing why I was doing it, but aware that I had a lot of creative firepower percolating in my reserves, and needing to direct it at… something. Anything. Even something so “self-absorbed” and inward-looking, so personal and “unhelpful” to anyone but me. I know there’s a lot of talk circulating these days about not pressuring yourself to be productive in the midst of the pandemic, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. Nobody should have to act like things are normal when they are most certainly not. But ladies, my defense mechanism is making stuff. I needed an outlet, even one that threatened me on an existential level.

What else was I going to do? It’s not like I had an inbox full of other projects that would either save humanity or pay for groceries. I had time, I had the materials, I had the energy, I literally had nothing better to do. I felt a bit sheepish about all of this at first, knowing that it would reveal a bit about our current living situation, our finances, and a lot about my psychological state.

It certainly helped to work on it with a friend.

Polina and I worked the project separately and together, conversing through images over the course of 20 days. It was truly comforting to see her images in my phone when I’d get up in the morning (she’s 6 hours behind in Prague), to see her place herself unselfconsciously in front of the camera in a similar way that I was, letting her images reveal what they would about how she was doing in her own fortress of COVID-free solitude. The shared sense of vulnerability was crucial to the life of the project. It felt like I was participating in SOMETHING, even if that something was self-directed. Also, it was nice to get instant feedback.

As the days went on, shooting gave me a sense of creative routine, something to do other than try to marry Abigail in Stardew Valley. In the evenings after dinner I’d excuse myself from Sean’s company to spend time alone with the camera. He rarely helped me set up or shoot – on my insistence – but I did show him each image before sending it to Polina. And we certainly enjoyed his minor cameos (read: his legs were sometimes in the shot).

By around day 14, I was starting to lose steam. It’s not easy to come up with more than a few ideas for how to make your flat look different in self-isolation and I fully admit I ran out lelz. So much for the creative fire. I think that’s around this time that Polina and I decided to cap it at 20 days. The project had served its purpose, and things were also starting to look up in Prague, which was starting to loosen quarantine restrictions. I think we had a good run, and 20 was a nice round number.

So did I learn anything, what’s the takeaway here? Have I finally answered the age-old question of what good is art in the middle of a pandemic, and why should we make it at all? Sir if you are here for answers, I am afraid you are shit out of luck. I have nothing concrete to cough up here, other than the usual – changing minds, and challenging assumptions are a good thing, actually. I’m not even sure I did that.

You can come to your own conclusion about the work by viewing it here.

At the end of the day, I think I just needed to reclaim my humanity in the midst of all this. Making art is something that makes us human; it’s something animals or plants can’t do. I think I just needed to feel that again. Being ripped away from our loved ones, our sense of purpose, and our means of survival in this capitalist hellhole can really suck the life out of you. I know we aren’t suffering in the same way other people are suffering, and I know my way of dealing with all of this might not be as selflessly helpful or as lucrative as others’ way. I don’t know what to tell you. I am just an artist in quarantine – I know I’m not going to change the world with pictures of myself, but I took them anyway.

I have always disliked the phrase “art for art’s sake” because I feel like it diminishes creative actions to something that serve no other purpose than to exist. I don’t think I really believe that, even if my insecurity says otherwise. The idealist and romantic and even the intellectual in me says art does something more than simply exist – it’s just in times like these, I have trouble articulating what that is.

As a very privileged person, I am aware that not everybody is in a place of being able to make stuff just because they want to – and I think art is more democratic than simply something that privileged people can will into existence in their spare time.

Despite the months of financial insecurity, I am fully aware of our privilege here. The mere ability to save when we did was a privilege. The fact that our refrigerator continues to be full of food and that we’ve been able to pay off the bills we accrued in our pre-COVID life is also major. Yeah, we’ve had to avoid most non-essential purchases, but we’re still able to afford the occasional box of doughnuts and bag of Jalapeño Cheetos. We’re still subscribed to Netflix and Adobe. We even get to turn the air conditioning on every now and again. I’m pretty thankful to be child-free right now, too.

I’ve seen all the memes and webcomics about how you are coping is fine dear, and a global pandemic will make anybody cranky. I’ve also read all the Twitter rants about how artists are the ones the world turns to for comfort in times of distress (and by that I think they mean – Tiger King). I think there’s probably some truth to that – I did turn to art for comfort. It’s possible I might have encouraged other people to do the same. Maybe that’s really as profound as it gets within my skill set.

And this project, to be fair, has opened a lot of doors to conversations about the role of art in a pandemic, women in the act of self-portraiture, how restrictions can unlock creativity. I suppose if I’ve made people think, then I’ve done my fair share.

I wish I had a more satisfying conclusion here than “Well, good feels.” I don’t know the answer to any question I’ve raised here.

Maybe when we look back at this stuff in 50 years, we’ll know better.