For reasons I can’t explain, I name my image folders by consecutive days, Day One, Day Two, and so on - most projects will end by Day Twenty Five. But when I was confined during the first Covid 19 lockdown in March 2020, confined to a beach house on the west coast of France, those days just kept coming.
With each pronouncement from the French Government that we would all stay at home for another week, I just kept shooting. It was my pub, my garden, my daily commute. My final folder was Day Fifty. Fifty consecutive days of rising with the sun, monitoring the tides, observing the wind direction and finishing as the sun slipped away. I had arrived in late winter and by the end, we had mired ourselves in a glorious summer of empty skies and vacant beaches.
I don’t know what to do with these images. I took them to pass the days and ameliorate the frustrations - borders were closed and I couldn’t work, and life had become a vacuum only punctuated by breaking news and daily death figures. I still don’t know what to do with them, but I know this much - my housemates spent their confinement watching the news from dawn to dusk shadowing their lives with the bleak temperament of the day, but I woke before dawn and stared at the most spectacular sunrises, watched seals bobbing on the horizon and Sandwich Terns pummelling shoals of sand eels as they slipped by on the tide. And I think it saved me.
