PAUL ROMANS

These photographs were made inside a quiet disaster. With incremental force the virus infected the social and political. In the process it exposed structural failures and ideological obsessions.

The work is concerned with temporality and psychological space: stillness and trauma. It tries to locate these properties in the myopic observation of elastic time. Looking for affects where it can find them, within the visceral stimuli of the ordinary and without recourse to narrativisation. 

The motivation for this project was to create a response, but it became apparent in the coextensive process of making and reflecting that it was just a manifestation. It is a paradox written from the inside looking out, suspended between shock and boredom. Blanchot writes that the disaster is not an event that arrives, but is rather an imminence which at the same time has (always) already passed. The disaster is therefore an interrogation of our relationship to space and time as well as to the body. 

Locked down and strung out we navigated an unstable territory between what Kathleen Stewart called “the dazed state of trauma and the cocooning we now call home”. An attempt was made by government to track the disaster using the ‘traffic light’ model deployed in medical environments. It usefully demonstrated how for months we drifted, vacillating between red and amber, a between-state which still contained the question: will we ever see the green light of the past?

This work was created between March and August 2020. It was submitted as the final major project for the Masters in Documentary Photography & Photojournalism, University of Westminster.

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