“Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.”
— George Orwell, 1984
Waiting for Time
It has been 36 years since the predicted world in George Orwell’s 1984. Our world is fundamentally different from the dystopian nightmare in Orwell’s novel. But he was right about one thing - Our reality is only a perception, and it might be manipulated beyond our control.
What we perceive is often not reality itself. With all available mediums to broadcast information, more often than not, we are fed perceived realities.
Therefore, it is extremely plausible to temper reality and create an alternate reality – a fake world.
The information that we are bombarded with on a constant and never-ending stream, through traditional as well as new media, clouds our minds and diminishes our critical thoughts, thus rendering our innate inquisitiveness idle.
We are not seeing what we think we are seeing; we are seeing what we have been taught and conditioned to see.
“We are seeing a story that is created for us.” *
“We don’t have the necessary machinery, and we wouldn’t even want it, to process carefully all of the amount of information that we are constantly bombarded with.” **
Controlling the truth is dangerous in itself, playing with it during a deadly pandemic can have catastrophic consequences, when humans can be caught between perception and reality.
As Londoners were being told to “Stay Home”, a new reality has taken shape for everyone – a different story for each person.
This is an artistic study of truth versus fiction, of digital versus analogue technology, of colour versus monochrome; of old versus new; of reality versus perception.
*quote by neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh – “Reality” is constructed by your brain. Here is what that means, and why it matters. – By Brian Resnick for Vox - June 22, 2020
** quote by Susana Martinez-Conde, neuroscientist researcher at SUNY Downstate Medical Centre, “Reality” is constructed by your brain. Here is what that means, and why it matters. – By Brian Resnick for Vox - June 22, 2020
London
On 23rd March 2020, in a live televised briefing, Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister announced a lockdown of the country to try and combat the threat of the novel coronavirus, Covid-19.
Life in the UK came to a halt for the first time since World War II, a new experience for everyone, save the elderly survivors of the World War II.
Apart from supermarkets, pharmacies and petrol stations, everything was shut down, including schools, with parents asked to home-school their children.
The streets were deserted, uncertainty hung in the air together with fear of the virus.
The unknown was palpable.
Berlin
The first confirmed case in Berlin was on 2nd March 2020, by 13th March 14 out of 16 federal states in the country decided to close their schools and nurseries and by the 22nd March all federal states decided to restrict gatherings of more than two people, restaurants and non-essential services were told to close and regional authorities had the power to impose stricter measure, with many imposing curfews and full lockdown measures. Life in Germany and its capital have come to a total halt for the first time since World War II.
I travelled to Germany after the easing of the lockdown in October to photograph and interview Berliners about the experience of the pandemic.
A few days after I departed Berlin, the city went into lockdown again.
This project is a subtle critique of our times, questioning how perception - that can be created easily - can override the truth and places us in harm’s way, especially during a deadly pandemic. This is an experiment of reality versus perception, of truth versus propaganda through the lens of an analogue and a digital camera.
My aim was to capture the lockdown in a unique but delicate way, showing not only the emptiness of the lockdown but also tell the personal stories of individuals.
As people struggled to adjust to the reality presented to them, I was exploring how perception can manipulate our senses.
On the 14th of May, with a slight easing of the lockdown, I began to photograph people in London, asking them to bring a chair outside and just sit on the empty street outside their homes. They were given no instruction, they were not directed in any way, they were asked to be themselves.
I did not set up the shots in any special ways, I only used natural light.
First taking the portraits with a Sony A7Riii full-frame digital camera, deliberately overexposing the shots to create a slightly surreal image. While the subjects remained seated, I changed cameras, this time using a 1960’s Hasselblad 500CM medium format analogue camera with black & white Ilford HP5 film and took their portraits again.
While the images are of the same people in the same positions in the same settings, I was creating two separate worlds; two separate realities, to show how our senses can be manipulated.
I followed up with filmed interviews to find out what effects the lockdown had on them. I then wrote the positive and negative feedbacks separately and combined all the negative write-ups with the digital colour images, and all the positive write-ups with the analogue black & white images.
Digital v Analogue - Colour v Black & White
According to many dictionaries the definition of digital photography is the taking or manipulation of photographs that are stored as data files on a computer. While digital photography provides the photo taker with sharper, truer-to-life images - and it has made photography accessible to most people globally - it is, by definition, a manipulation of reality.
In addition, due to its widespread availability and affordability, in 2019 over 1.4 trillion digital images were taken. In contrast, according to Kodak, in 1999 at the height of analogue photography 80 billion film images were taken. That is a 17.5-fold increase in 20 years.
It can be argued that the increase in quantity has reduced the quality of images, making them less valuable or memorable for the photo taker. It could be suggested that when it comes to analogue photography, more thoughts and effort is given by the photographer, thus creating artistically superior quality images, which on the other hand may be poorer in clarity to its digital counterpart.
Most people see the world in colour and colour photography has been the standard choice since colour film was invented. Colour is the norm; it is the reality to many of us. Colour photography, especially digital colour photography, can portray the truest likeness. We are conditioned to see photographs in colour and the majority if not all images in media and advertising as well as new media are in colour. We see in colour, we are used to colour images, and we expect colour. It is life to us, or rather we are told so.
On the other hand, black and white images make us pause, make us think and take a deeper look. It is said that black and white imagery are timeless, but they still take us back in time, sometimes beyond the reality we might be comfortable with.
Black and white photography, especially black and white portraits convey more emotion, capturing humanity in its rawest, truest way.
The Participants
I shot over 30 rolls of film and over 1,000 digital images of 48 individuals.
They included an Egyptian Intensive Care Unit consultant doctor from London’s St George’s Hospital who was dealing with the pandemic from the frontline and was responsible for the planning of the response for South West London, a Canadian journalist and author who was kidnapped in Afghanistan in 2008 (she has published a best-selling book about her ordeal), an English homeless filmmaker who was sleeping rough on the streets of London for the first four weeks of the lockdown.
From single mothers coping alone in the lockdown, to a bus driver with a big family and a grandmother who was shielding at home with them, to a successful businesswoman who created a neighbourhood collective cooking food and delivering it to the vulnerable.
From a barrister who was shielding to a young singer/songwriter who was signed just before the lockdown and was preparing to record her first album, to a Jewish Rabbi and a Christian vicar, from students, to a cleaning lady with her small business, to a single mum working in a supermarket, to a former UFC fighter, to an actor, artists, a comedian, and television presenter, to students and many more; I wanted to involve an eclectic mix of Londoners.
In Berlin I photographed a theatre director and filmmaker, a musician, a model, a style blogger, a travel industry marketing executive, a commercial photographer, and a barista.
The Music
The soundtracks for the exhibition are provided with kind permission by Wake Island and chosen by Yamam Nabeel to complement the theme of the exhibition.
Wake Island is an electronic producer duo originally from Beirut and now based between Montreal and New York. Through their music, they attempt to reconcile their Arab roots with their North American lives, infusing Middle-Eastern sounds into songs that are inspired by Detroit techno and 80-90s pop/rock.
The band is composed of Philippe Manasseh and Nadim Maghzal, who met in Montreal in the early 2000s. While pursuing a biology Ph.D. and a finance degree, they became part of the flourishing local music scene and threw themselves into a series of musical projects.
Wake Island is an electronic producer duo originally from Beirut and now based between Montreal and New York. Through their music, they attempt to reconcile their Arab roots with their North American lives, infusing Middle-Eastern sounds into songs that are inspired by Detroit techno and 80-90s pop/rock.
The band is composed of Philippe Manasseh and Nadim Maghzal, who met in Montreal in the early 2000’s.
For more information please visit www.wakeislandmusic.com