Jessica Power COVID-19 Photo Essay
Item
- Title
- Jessica Power COVID-19 Photo Essay
- Subject
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COVID-19 (Disease)
- Description
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My Experience of the Covid-19 Pandemic was inherently privileged but still difficult. Much of my time that had previously been eaten up by the systems I was a part of, had been freed. My attention turned from the constant rush of my own life, outward. Spending so much time with my now uninterrupted thoughts also led to many personal revelations. A staggering fact to contemplate is that I am not singular in these experiences. This shared, universal event was in many ways an incredible thing to witness and be a part of. I have never felt a sense of global culture and community like this before. A global state of fear, frustration, loss & mourning, boredom and above all: growth. Comparing our experiences has yielded many differences, showing us how truly privileged we are. While for others it has been an ongoing struggle made much worse. This image gallery consists of captured moments within my own experiences of the pandemic. Some have connected me to the world who experienced something fabulously similar. Others that have simply shaped me personally, from this experience.
The world may have fallen apart a little in this time of crisis, but humanity was never more together. For me specifically: I did what I could and watched the world through my phone from my ancestral home in Shrough. I read, painted, skateboarded, studied, and baked far too many batches of scones. I applied for college alone at my desk and I received my college place alone at my desk. I lost 15kg from excessively exercising out of sheer boredom. The world changed rapidly around us over the course of the pandemic. Everything found its way to the digital world in some shape or form. The current digital era was redefined during the pandemic. Everyone had to learn how to navigate a totally new way of interacting and existing with one another online. In the spirit of this new leg of the digital era, I took quite a few photos along the way.
Photo One:
When 2020 ended, the pandemic went nowhere. Just short of an entire year after covid 19 hit Ireland, many of us were still working from home and self-isolating for our safety and the safety of others. I spent a lot of time at my desk throughout our many national lockdowns, completing most of my leaving cert curriculum sitting right here.
Photo Two:
My grandfather, seen in the photo, received a puppy during the pandemic. The concept of a ‘pandemic puppy’ is a controversial one, considering many people would soon be returning to work, covid depending and leaving their too coddled dogs alone causing anxiety and depression in the animal. But my grandfather, being long retired, would not have a drastically different lifestyle sans pandemic, and thus it was deemed acceptable. He named the dog Toby.
Photo Three:
During the major lockdowns of the pandemic, the guidelines suggested that we do not leave our houses, the only exceptions being emergencies, getting food, fleeing domestic abuse, getting tested for covid, if you were an essential worker and finally: for exercise within a 5km limit. This was the road by my house I ran on.
Photo Four:
My grandfather and my dad, in my dad's, shed “the workshop”. During one of my mother's fathers' brief visits over the course of the pandemic.
Photo Five:
A nest of baby swallows fell from our gable in the middle of the first major national lockdown. Upon receiving advice over the phone from multiple veterinarians and a local aviary expert, I began to raise them. One of them died, but the other two learned to fly and joined the flock of swallows in the area. This was a very formative experience on my personal first lockdown, rather than my other universal examples.
As prolonged as the pandemic winded up being, the days blurred into one another and before we knew it more than a year had passed. The Pandemic was certainly a formative experience for me as an individual. It has also certainly been a formative experience for humanity as a whole. There are many serious themes and contexts to this newest chapter in the history books. But there are also just as many light-hearted and wholesome ones as well. These photos depict a calm, uneventful, boring, and nurturing break from the hectic day to day we have become used to. I have chronicled my own personal experience of the Covid-19 pandemic through photos, and looking at them now, I feel a strange sense of nostalgia. And a sense of optimism, considering the knock-on effects of this pandemic that we are beginning to see in the form of social change and environmental aid. Social movements happened to thrive in this adverse environment. This entire experience has been so incredibly beneficial, despite the loss and suffering it has also caused.
- Creator
- Jessica Power
- Date
- March 2020 - April 2021
- Rights
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Cork Folklore Project
- Publisher
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Cork Folklore Project
- Item sets
- Photo Essays
