Homo Alone

Did somebody say Pandemic?

The last year has been tough at times. Especially this last lockdown (winter 2020/2021) Being single, living alone and working for myself mostly from home is a cauldron of loneliness! I’m a little bit of an introvert so I need time to myself to recharge but hun the batteries are now FULL and I’m ready for life to start happening again. Well actually it already is as I write this, which is probably why I feel like writing this almost a year after it actually happened! I’m not going to bore you with all my lockdown details, it’s been a journey and there’s been different parts to it. But it wasn’t all bad. 

A peeling back of personal layers

The first lockdown was a novelty. I’d not long been in the house I’m in now so I appreciated to extra time at home at first to settle in. The weather was good and I have a nice sized garden which I expressed gratitude for on a daily basis throughout the spring of 2020. I turned the camera on myself back then and after a few simple portraits of myself I thought it would be fun to get a bit more creative with my self portraits. I kept going throughout the whole first lockdown and what developed (unintentionally) was my art self portrait project Homo Alone. I’d covered a range of emotions and themes and all the pictures seemed to work together as a set. Half way through the project I got some of them printed and the idea formed to create a book/magazine of the work I was doing. It was a new creative side of my photography I was unpacking for the first time. I’m very proud of the this series and will hopefully help me personally reflect on the pandemic in a positive way. 

In a magazine shop near you

I felt compelled to share the work with a wider audience than my Facebook feed and the magazine got picked up by a handful of independent book/magazine shops in the UK. I haven’t actually finished promoting the work and there was talk of some of these prints being included in a group show of aspiring queer artists, so watch this space! In the meantime you can check out the website to see the full set of images. The magazine also includes other photographic work of mine and a series of words and their meaning to tie the project together. You can buy your own copy of the magazine too!