Snippets from an artist’s (and father’s) day-to-day during lockdown in Luxembourg

In the time of Coronavirus as social distancing is the new norm and people are staying home for most of the time, everyone has to keep busy… As artists we are challenged to work with what we got and maybe find new ways of approaching our craft. Let me tell you more about my creative quarantine…

Luxembourg has been under lockdown for four weeks now. Schools, restaurants, bars and most shops are closed. This confinement is probably very different for many people. I cannot speak for those living this quarantine alone or for those hunkered down with their life partners. I imagine there is lots of teleworking, Netflix and chill and mostly watching time go by. But please correct me if I’m wrong and tell me all about your confinement!

From my point of view, having a family of five, of which two are toddlers, has made this quarantine pretty tiresome, but also never boring and always very entertaining! Days pass by blazingly fast and work never gets done! On some days I have the impression to only go from one meal to the next, wondering what happened to the hours in-between. This might not be the case for every kid, but mine definitely have bottomless stomachs! Thankfully there is plenty of positive sides to being confined with your children. You finally get to see them as much as you always wanted - no sarcasm intended - even if you miss those ‘quiet hours’ at work! And for a photographer, children are a perfect, even though challenging, subject to photograph. As you can imagine, I have hundreds of images of my children, but I will only show you a select few to avoid making this post an overly proud dad’s Facebook profile, but also to preserve my children’s privacy. The other photos in this blog post have been made during local walks or simply while staying home. By the way, in case you were wondering, all images of this post have been made with the Fujifilm X100V, which I have recently added to my kit.

The new routine

With daycare and schools closed, my children now spend all of their time at home with two working parents! Most days have been a succession of playtime, cooking, taking walks and trying to work! Our children have not reached school-age yet, so there is no real ‘homeschooling’ going on, although we try to keep them somewhat busy during playtime. However, if you are reading this in hopes of finding new exciting ways to occupy your kids, don’t waste your time, you won’t find anything useful below…

As you can’t keep children inside for days on end, daily walks have become part of the new routine. Walks and hikes have always been part of our free-time, although they usually meant discovering different places most of the time. Lately walks have been limited to our local area. As playgrounds are closed, we mostly stick to our local parks and forests. There’s plenty to do, even if we tend to respect the social distancing recommendations and not take a walk every 5 minutes. Dog owners, I’m looking at you… :-P

Luxembourg is beautiful this time of year with nature waking up from its winter slumber and cherry blossoms popping up everywhere. While I would usually head to a few familiar places around the country, the lockdown has forced me to focus more on my local area. It has lead me to discover some beautiful trees I never knew were so close-by my home and it has also forced me take a different approach, shooting more close-subject and macro-style pictures for a lack of grand vistas in my local area. You can read all about it in my previous blog post about photographing Luxembourg’s Cherry Blossoms.

Taking walks with my camera without any specific goal or location in mind has also allowed me to concentrate on doing more street photography. Strange situations and sights arise during Luxembourg’s lockdown period. I get a rather depressing feeling when walking the streets lately - people mostly keep their distance, wear masks and gloves. The nice weather with its infinite blue sky is such a stark contract to these gloomy times.

During the era of social distancing we spend most time inside our four walls though. This is where playtime comes in! TV is for lazy parents, right? I’m just joking of course! While we do not tend to overly plan out playtime, we do play games, read books and, yes, we do watch cartoons too! Thankfully the weather has been amazing lately and we are lucky enough to have a garden where we can set free the children. That sandbox is truly a lifesaver keeping toddlers busy for hours on end with the added benefit to provide ample situations to make pictures!

Cooking has also been a major pass-time these past few weeks. Making nearly three meals a day is already a challenge in itself. Thankfully my four year old son is a master chef! I wish… But we try to involve him whenever possible. If only there weren’t always a mess to clean up every single time!

Working from home

Working has become a major challenge these past few weeks. I find it pretty amusing to see that many friends make jokes and feel challenged by the fact that they now have to work from home, while I have been working from my home office for 12 years now! Sure, I’m usually in and out all the time, which hasn’t been the case lately. But I believe that we are lucky that so many of us have been able to telework from home! Although work is a big word in that regard, since juggling between all of the above and working is a bit of a utopia. It has taken me nearly two weeks to finish this very article!

Lately my work mostly consists of browsing through my archives and post-process old images that never made it off my hard-drives. I’ve been sharing some of them on social media. I have also been teaching online courses for Lightroom and reviewing portfolios. Working through video calls from the comfort of my atelier has allowed me to keep doing what I like most - photography and teaching. Furthermore I have been preparing future projects that have been on my mind for some time. I am happy to say that I am making some progress, even if it’s slow...

I am very much looking forward to work going back to a more normal state - heading out for photography without restrictions, meeting clients again, planning exhibitions, holding workshops, etc. The good times will be back, I’m sure…

What remains and what comes after

The photos I am creating lately are very different from what I usually do, but they feel significant. I always felt that photography and emotion are intimately linked, and that the process of creation is strongly influenced by our sensitivity to those same emotions. However my emotional attachment to some of these pictures is very different than usual, on a more personal level. As photographers we are all recording moments in time, may it be to document our own stories or to tell a larger tale. These images may just be snippets of one individual’s life and bear no importance to anybody else, but during exceptional times these images become part of our history…

It may not be much, but for me personally this image is defining of the times we currently live in. My son is standing at the garden fence and speaking (or rather shouting) to the neighbour’s children living two gardens away. They have known each other for as long as they probably remember, going together to the same daycare and now the same school. They have been keeping it touch almost every day like this. They have also sent each other gifts and made short videos that we exchanged between parents. And while they know that a virus and an illness is somewhere out there, it probably does not mean much to them…

We applaud doctors and celebrate people that keep working during these trying times - with good reason - but we tend to forget the sacrifice that is imposed on our children as well. From one day to the next they were ripped from their routines. No more school, no more playtime with their friends. I’m grateful that my children are probably young enough to forget all about this crisis, once things return to normal, if they’ll ever really do return to normal… Scars on society will probably remain for some time. Will we go back to shaking hands with strangers or hugging our loved ones without any thoughts of the invisible enemy, as some call it? It will definitely leave scars, but even those heal with time…