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