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Smudged windows: scenes from home during a pandemic

During the Coronavirus lockdown of 2020, the space of home for many of us expanded considerably, from a place of refuge and rest, to the primary location of nearly every event in our lives. This photo essay documents the lived, and felt, experience of life at home in suburban Philadelphia during lockdown. Shot through smudged and hazy windows and depicting ambiguous scenes that are often difficult to identify or figure out, it seeks to document both the alien eeriness of pandemic life and the utter mundanity of being stuck at home for months at a time. The accompanying text adds further emotional complexity to the visual narrative without simplifying or explaining the images. The images and the text are meant to sit alongside one another, complicating and sometimes contradicting each other, and presenting aspects of the experience that the other is ill-equipped to capture. My hope is that this essay reveals something of the emotional complexity of lockdown, its irreducibility and singularity, its fraught affective atmosphere not easily represented in either images or words.