Bigger than the Deutsche Borse Photography prize, it's the office photo competition: What A Year.
22nd March 2020 - Tesco filled the shelves left empty from the panic-buying of loo rolls with buckets of flowers for mother's day. The scent of the end of civilisation has unexpectedly turned out to be fresh and lovely.
I don't think it will win any prizes for being an amazing looking photograph. It's a snapshot, and without the context doesn't mean anything particularly. Only with accompanying words does it carry much meaning at all, and even then perhaps only to me.
I think it will be easy to forget the day to day experience early on in the pandemic. When a trip to the supermarket meant going to the back of a queue around the side of the building, maintaining social distancing from the person in front and accepting the rhythm of life had changed; feeling the sun on one's face, looking at distant tree tops waving in the breeze and the stop-start rhythm practicing walking meditation, was the relaxing precursor to shopping.
The toilet roll aisle in Tesco had been stripped weeks before and the shelves bare until a day or two before Mother's Day when these troughs of flowers miraculously appeared.
March 2020 onwards was a time of moments that linger, when the routine everyday social relations with the people in one's life, with co-workers and neighbours, became subtly different, became sort of precious. We seemed to have more time for each other, to see each other more, to share our lives a little bit... and to fret if someone was not around for a while.
The present was a land far, far away. They do things differently there.