The Climbing Community During the Lockdown
This was a project which taught me a lot, was lots of fun, and I will definitely remember.
Throughout the project we made a photo essay describing how a community changed and accustomed to the physical distancing that will most likely be in effect until around June 1st. I used my bike to get around to take some shorts of the changes. I mostly biked to places, took some pictures, played around, and biked back. The system worked well and sometimes I did have to walk but that was when I hiked to get somewhere. I got quite a few good pictures and in the end I got enough to make the photo essay which I hope you enjoy.
(Click on the photos to see where they’re from, the ones without links are from Deep Cove).
I hope you enjoyed it and that I managed to tell a story through the pictures and that little bit of text.
The climbing community that I’ve made my photo essay about is the North Shore climbing community, mostly the Hive Community. I made it about the North Shore Hive community because that’s where I and more or less all of the climbers from Cap University, along with quite a few from Lonsdale climb. I also chose The Hive because their logo is “Your climbing community” which ties in with project quite well.
Now onto the driving question.
How can we, as photojournalists, tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?
I think that because in photojournalism you’re not actually touching the person being photographed, it’s ok to take pictures of people. So you can tell a story by photographing a process that people are going through. You can also take pictures of the places affected by (in this case the lockdown) an event and how it’s unusual.
Overall this was a project that I thoroughly enjoyed and would most likely do on my spare time over a longer period. I think that we learned a lot about the pandemic itself and about the community we were studying. As you had seen, almost all of my pictures didn’t have anyone in them and when they did the person in them was me. So you can even tell just by looking at the photos that something is off. It was a good project which I would like to do a variation of in the future.
