Images by Colin Stanley Hovde. Words by Adriana Nodal-Tarafa.
We were instantly drawn to the idea of capturing a part of this shared global experience in the town where we live, built on the unceded ancestral land of the Duwamish people. It all began after Colin's friends, Erin and Ian, shared Canadian photographer Peter Kane's isolation portraiture work. More than displaying people, though, we thought, 'what a great chance to hear each other's voices; to connect our lens of this time with theirs, and then amplify it.'
We had a personal desire for safe human connection, and for everyone involved to witness who we all are, in our own voices, in this moment of necessary physical distancing. The more faithful to our communities' multiplicity of identities, the better, as far as we were concerned. We wanted to find ourselves less alone, less atomized.
By the same token, we are under no illusion about this fact: the experiences we captured are decidedly not generalizable to all people experiencing the pandemic.
We want to be extremely clear about this. Many people in this same land and across this earth are experiencing overwhelmingly more profound struggles set up by historical inequity during the pandemic. Our portraits do not, by far, reflect an all-encompassing view of the kinds of resilience born out of historical oppression. Moreover, capturing this was not our goal.
We understand the limitations of our own perspective and reach. We would like for you to think critically about those limitations too, when you enjoy this content.
We decided to offer portraits while people are physically distancing from others, and share our reflections during this time, to lift people's spirits up in a time of crisis.
At the same time, by carving out this space for relatedness, we are not interested in imposing a lens on any geography or people. We do not endorse erasing anyone's pain, or otherwise tokenizing any bodies.