Photography can touch you…
A message during lockdown:
I’m sitting in the garden and feeling the warmth of the sun on my skin and thinking about the multitude of ‘new normals’ that might emerge from this period of enforced slowdown. That, as the world around us shrinks to fit into our immediate surroundings, our bedrooms, gardens, streets and parks, the space also grows to imagine new possibilities that carry the potential to both delight and terrify.
But perhaps it took this demand to ‘socially distance’ and ‘self-isolate’ to fully realise how much we need each other, that we really are all in this together. That it is our collective responsibility to help make the world around us, a more sustainable, equitable, better place to live.
So, we need each other, we need to share ideas, offer new perspectives, to collectively construct new realities. This can and will happen in a multitude of ways, but we can be sure that photographic forms of representation and communication will play its part. The light that warms my skin, is the same energy utilised by the camera to represent the world around us, not only to record ‘what was’ but to point towards what is possible.
The light that warms my skin is the light that flooded into the cameras of the graduating students and fills the images of their work on show here, bask in the collective glow of their creative ingenuity. Even in these socially distant times, photography can touch you.
Liam Devlin