I started 2020 in Florida. I’d gone there for a few days for a course, to talk about the internet and to see some colleagues. Half the world away for a few days. Who does that any more? Some time ago, when one of the earlier lockdowns was re-announced and extended, my eldest son asked “for some different news,” and then asked if a picture of a judge in his copy of The Wind in the Willows was “Boris Johnson.” Some kid at school had said Boris was his Dad, and my son told me, indignantly, that he had been tricked.
2020 isn’t a trick though; it was real. A million thinkpieces will declare 2020 a “year to forget,” or be contrarian and say it was the year the 21st century came to be. In Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End, one of the characters says something close to how it really is:
“Things just go on. Lot of life is like that. I look back over fifty years of life and I wonder where the years went... a man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands.”
Between Florida and now, life has felt like a very intense study of just a few things - a couple of square miles of territory, a few rooms, one type of day, two or three news stories, four or five meals the kids will eat - all of them repeated, thousands of times over.
2020? I just want to remember it, and remember something other than Zoom calls - so I took a lot of photographs. Mostly of my children, of my patch of London. It seemed like something to do. In a history book I read this year, the Palestinian playwright Amir Nizar is quoted as saying: “It’s paying endless, very close attention. That’s what love is.” Ah.
Sally Mann, the American photographer:
“In general, I am past taking pictures for the sake of seeing how things look in a photograph, although sometimes, for fun, I still do that. These days I am more interested in photographing things either to understand what they mean in my life or to illustrate a concept.”
I think the exact opposite of this. All I want to do is record, record, record. “I don’t have a philosophy, I have a camera” said Saul Leiter. “It is not where it is or what it is that matters, but how you see it.”
But where do these kind of photographs go? What do they do? Which ones do the remembering? That is what this is for. I wanted to do something else with them that’s not primping them for Instagram, so I printed a huge pile of them as 8 x 10s. This is a tiny, tiny piece of 2020, as I saw it. There are no specific pictures of masks, or big news events. There are no pictures of Zoom calls. Just endless close attention to some of the other stuff.
Right now, it is a Substack Newsletter, because I’ve never written a viral tweet. At least it is not a podcast. I think I’ll get two things from it; the first is the newsletter will form the rough draft of a photobook, and it’s a good way to hold myself to account for that. As ever, I enjoy having written, not necessarily all the parts before that. But I need your perspective too. I need your light on these things; they need some space to breathe, some oxygen - like we all need a little more space, this year.
There will be between 10 to 20 emails over the next few weeks, with a photo and some words about what I am trying to remember. It will seem strange reading about 2020 as we gradually accelerate away from it; maybe it will show what has changed, and what remains the same. Maybe it will show just “how strange it is to be anything at all,” as the Neutral Milk Hotel song has it.
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In the meantime, tell your friends!