Inside: Home, Family and Community in a Historical Collective Moment

© Emily Lindsay Brown - Image from the Inside: Home, Family and Community in a Historical Collective Moment photography project © Emily Lindsay Brown - Image from the Inside: Home, Family and Community in a Historical Collective Moment photography project © Emily Lindsay Brown - Image from the Inside: Home, Family and Community in a Historical Collective Moment photography project View all images ↓
View all images ↓
  • Dates
    2020 - 2020
  • Author
  • Topics Portrait, Daily Life, Contemporary Issues
  • Location Mittagong, Australia

Documenting daily life during the Covid-19 pandemic has offered plenty of moments for reflection. There has been a stillness to this time, not just on the streets of our cities, but also inside our homes and – at the best of times – our minds. Each photograph represents a realisation.

This album contains the photographs I entered into the PHMuseum Mobile Photography Prize 2020, and some more besides. I've been incredibly fortunate in my experience of this pandemic - I recently arrived in Australia with my partner after ten years abroad, with some savings and a place to stay at my mum's home in rural New South Wales - and these photographs reflect that privilege. Yet I hope they also capture the strange suspense of life under lockdown. Using my Samsung Galaxy S8 has allowed me to photograph moments of beauty and intimacy that I might not otherwise have been prepared to capture: the first light of the day, the moments before sleep, a conversation or a reflection that could have flickered past undocumented without this pocket-sized camera close to hand.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - Image from the Inside: Home, Family and Community in a Historical Collective Moment photography project
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In lockdown, hunks of our lives have migrated online, through the imperatives to work, socialise, and be entertained. There, it's easy to be carried away on the interminable flow of information.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - Image from the Inside: Home, Family and Community in a Historical Collective Moment photography project
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In lockdown, we torment ourselves with dreams of freedom: window-shopping at shut-down businesses, making dateless plans for "when restrictions ease", awaiting a "normal" that may never return.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - Image from the Inside: Home, Family and Community in a Historical Collective Moment photography project
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In lockdown, self-isolation has, for some, required co-habitation. Families become housemates as they draw together to keep safe, navigating this new closeness til it's time to part again.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - Image from the Inside: Home, Family and Community in a Historical Collective Moment photography project
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In lockdown, we start each day surveying uncharted territory. Though by now, certain landmarks are familiar - Zoom calls, quick trips outdoors - there remains an apprehension of the unknown.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - Image from the Inside: Home, Family and Community in a Historical Collective Moment photography project
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In lockdown, history catches up with us. Cartoons from the Spanish Flu circulate like memes. We see generations past - and all that they survived - in a new light.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - In lockdown, streetlamps light the way for no one.
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In lockdown, streetlamps light the way for no one.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - In lockdown, some things can't be kissed and made better - we just wait til they pass.
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In lockdown, some things can't be kissed and made better - we just wait til they pass.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - In lockdown, we have time to notice when perfection emerges from the quotidian.
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In lockdown, we have time to notice when perfection emerges from the quotidian.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - In lockdown, our focus adjusts between the reality confronting us, and the reality that's taking shape in the distance.
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In lockdown, our focus adjusts between the reality confronting us, and the reality that's taking shape in the distance.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - In lockdown, the delicacy and diversity of flowers brought in from outside seems sacred.
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In lockdown, the delicacy and diversity of flowers brought in from outside seems sacred.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - In lockdown, routines offer some shadowy sense of normalcy.
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In lockdown, routines offer some shadowy sense of normalcy.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - In lockdown, we make a burn pile and set it alight.
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In lockdown, we make a burn pile and set it alight.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - In lockdown, we plant the seeds we want to flourish - and hope the Earth can bear them.
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In lockdown, we plant the seeds we want to flourish - and hope the Earth can bear them.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - In lockdown, romance becomes resistance.
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In lockdown, romance becomes resistance.

© Emily Lindsay Brown - In lockdown, time unfolds at a different pace.
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In lockdown, time unfolds at a different pace.