TECHNICAL DETAILS

ANNVS COVIDENSIS MMXX – SLOTH
Sony A7iii
Sony Zeiss 16-35 f/4 G OSS
ISO 400, 21mm, f/9 1/60

VIEW THE PROJECT

You can view the entire ANNVS COVIDENSIS MMXX project <here>.

SIN IN THE TIME OF COVID

The year we will always remember as the start of the COVID-19 global pandemic, 2020, was challenging across all walks of life. As a portrait photographer, this was a particular challenge in that it separated me from the very thing that the genre demands: subjects. Adrift, as it were, with few available people in the bubble to shoot, it led to a dramatic cessation of photo activity for me. In many ways, I hold all the blame, to the extent such a thing exists, for my own decrease in productivity. I could easily have moved genres and spent the months of isolation perfecting macro photography of things found in the house, or switched to landscapes and ventured, solitary, into the woods. But at the end of the day, my creativity and interest is sparked by shooting portraits of people. And given that, I circled into great a great lull. There were occasions, of course, where family, or Leigh, or someone in the bubble was available. And I could have masked and shot outdoors, or done “porch sessions” and other spins on the classic interaction of a photographer and their subject. But I didn’t.

As the year entered its final months, however, two things became apparent: first, there was hope on the pandemic and political horizon with the first vaccines moving into distribution and the none-too-soon demise of the previous presidential administration. And hope, perhaps one of the greatest of human traits, once it takes root, is not a fragile thing. I needed a new project to create.

Fortunately, I have one subject that I can count on being present and willing to participate in a photo project, namely, myself. As I’m sure nearly everyone had recently, I had spent considerable time thinking about the nature of our strange new existence in the age of COVID-19, how the quarantines, social distancing and changes to so many previous practices had influenced our perception and context for society. In doing research and reading about these themes, I began to wonder what it would mean to reinterpret some classical themes in light of the profound societal changes we’re witnessing. In my case particularly, the end of normal office engagement through completely remote work, isolation from my children who remained in their college apartments and distanced from us, all coalesced into long periods of time with just Leigh and I physically together. We engaged with colleagues, friends and family continually, but all through a monitor and webcam.

My contemplation of all these factors led me to looking through some art history for inspiration, and I ran across a series of engravings by Pieter Breughel, The Elder, from the late 1500s. In this series Breughel takes aim at the seven Cardinal Sins: Greed, Sloth, Lust, Wrath, Gluttony, Pride and Envy. He illustrates them as caricatures, almost invoking Hieronymus Bosch, with complex and detailed scenes of the horrors. But there is clearly a comedic edge to them, too. The grotesqueness of the figures and the scenes they occupy cut the edge of humor. Viewing these engravings led me to contemplating what the Cardinal Sins meant then, truly. And what do they mean now? Have the moral imperatives changed fundamentally with the times, or do they stand unchanged, with only their manifestations foretelling their currency?

I was inspired to produce a modern take on these scenes. A 21st century riff on the great Sins in the time of COVID. I thought of how this year has been so dramatically impactful globally, our annus horribilis, to quote Elisabeth II of England. And so, ANNUS COVIDENSIS MMXX was born. The series had to be self portraiture, to underscore our pandemic isolation. And as i was creating the images, I needed a way to tie it to the inspiration Breughel provided, so elected to retain the latin captions unaltered from his works in the 1580s. I’ve received a good deal of feedback on whether I should routinely include the translation of the latin in my captions for these images. In my initial postings, I have not. Perhaps, over time I’ll reconsider that, but in the meanwhile, it gives the interested viewer an opportunity to engage with the material in a manner beyond visual, searching for the translation, interpreting Bosch’s Latin, while reading into the scenes how they fit with their own conception of this strangest of years.

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