The germ of an idea
While putting this site together I had the uplifting news that a photo I submitted has been accepted for exhibition at Through the Lens of Covid, a local show at Charlton House near where I live in Greenwich. The brief was imagery taken within the borough, reflecting the impact of the pandemic on daily life. My photo was taken on Christmas day—as families could not travel to meet up, our big gift-unwrapping ceremony took place via Zoom between four different houses. It seems that out of all the submissions 12 were selected for display, so it’s quite an honour. The exhibition is organised by the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust, which safeguards key structures, objects and historic records within the Royal Borough of Greenwich. Its bailiwick includes the borough’s large photographic collection, covering 100 years of changing landscape, faces and experiences within Greenwich, into which the winning photos will be added. The exhibition launches at the Horn Fair on Sunday 17th October. (The exact length that it will run has not yet been finalised.)
Christmas, 2020-style
Funnily enough, this is my second photographic win courtesy of the pandemic. During 2020, while people shut indoors were putting rainbows, signs and jokes in their windows, my wife Ali started drawing a cartoon cat to put in our own window. He started as a response to some jokes that the kids in the house opposite put up—the cat was laughing at their jokes. But he took on a life of his own, gradually evolving his saucer-eyed look and his relationship with a group of mice (frankly the mice are the brains of the operation). They did everyday things, responding to the days of the week, significant dates and what the weather was like, but Ali deliberately never mentioned Covid as such: this was meant to be an escape from all that. It was quite a task she set herself, as she put up a new cartoon each day for 50 days. Neighbours on our street used to talk about the “Kemsing Cat” and at least one of them started coming out each day to see what he was up to. (You can follow the whole story on the cat’s own Facebook page, through which we raised a bit of money for the local hospice.)
Anyway, about this time last year someone tipped me off that the Museum of London was gathering items, experiences and ephemera that illustrated the city’s experience of the pandemic, a project called Collecting Covid. So I submitted the whole Corona Cat experience. It took a lot of committee hours but the curators did accept three or four of the original cartoons plus my daily photos documenting the evolution of this window art, from its origins to its grand finale when the cat did a parachute jump for charity (a display that required things stuck up in windows across three floors). To complement the photo above, here’s Corona Cat’s Christmas:
