Dese’Rae & Felicidad with their children Theo and Gus, 2020. © Helen Maurene Cooper

Philadelphia based photographer Helen Maurene Cooper uses the 19th-century wet plate collodion process to make socially distant Ambrotype street portraits of her neighbors during quarantine.

Helen Maurene Cooper’s photography is driven by personal connection and relationship building. In long-form documentary projects, she has photographed drag queen culture, Floridian mermaid performers, and has collaborated on portraits with Black and Latinx-owned specialty nail businesses on Chicago’s West Side. Feminism, entrepreneurship, and the power of adornment are central to her work.

Cooper moved from Chicago to Philadelphia’s East Kensington in 2019. Months later, as Covid 19 swept the nation, the challenge of engaging a new creative community and balancing parenthood (Cooper has an 11-month old daughter) and professional demands intensified. How does a photographer who relies on the intimacy of portraiture navigate these limitations? How does one get to know their neighbors when all interactions must take place at a mandatory six-foot distance, our faces obscured by masks?

Cooper takes this challenge in stride. Setting up her 8x10 camera just beyond her front door, she commits her neighbors’ images to history on wet collodion plates. People of the Pandemic, River Wards - Philadelphia is a project for the Covid age, calling to mind the visual traces of historical crises including the Civil War and the 1918 influenza epidemic that tested American resolve.

We spoke about producing a mature body of work that reflects seven years of working with the collodion process, social distance portrait photography, how connections are made amidst pandemic, and how the white gaze might shape this moment of social reckoning.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Helen Maurene Cooper

Self Portrait – 04.24.20 San Francisco, CA “It’s just a matter of time.” Audio: Disorder – Joy Division — Self Portrait – 04.24.20 San Francisco, CA
“It’s just a matter of time.”
Audio: Disorder – Joy Division

Robert Canali stages virtual photo sessions with home-bound friends, colleagues, and total strangers to understand communication and intimacy in the age of social distance.

In the weeks following social distancing, photographers around the world sought a creative and sincere way to respond. The New York Times ran a haunting piece on some of today’s most famous photographers including Stephen Shore, Catherine Opie, and Rinko Kawauchi looking out (and in) at their changing worlds. A day earlier, Lenscratch produced a compelling group show of emerging photographers called Quarantined Life and countless other curators and galleries have followed suit.

Midway through April, San Francisco-based photographer Robert Canali began Screentime, one of the most distinctive and unexpected photographic responses so far. Moved by the virtualization of social interactions, he started using one of photography’s earliest processes – the late 19th-century technique of lumen prints – to make portraits over Zoom.

Rather than photographing with a drone, like many commercial photographers have been doing for remote brand work, Canali sets up a Zoom call with friends and strangers, and places light-sensitive photo paper on his iPad. Before the photographic session begins, he asks his sitters a series of questions ranging from “How has the Pandemic changed your life for the worse”, “Has anything in your life improved?”, and “Is there anything about life, when it returns to a “new normal” that you think will be changed permanently?” (see image captions below for the responses).

Then he goes silent. His subjects hold still for 15 minutes while listening to a playlist of their favorite songs as the paper slowly absorbs their image. When the “photoshoot” is complete, Canali develops the paper in his studio darkroom. The images are often slightly blurry and signal the growing space between peers and the waiting game to return to reality. The further you stand from them, the sharper they appear.

Canali’s approach is meditative and conceptual and plays with old and new technology as a metaphor for our shifting and confused relationship to time.

Shortly after participating in one of his early sessions (thanks to Efrem Zelony-Mindell for introducing us), we reconnected to talk about the process and his ideas behind it.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Robert Canali

People of the Pandemic: Wet Plate Portraits from a Social Distance

A 15-Minute Portrait of Social Distance