Photography in the pandemic w/ Matt Day - Social Distancing

For a lot of us, 2020, was a terrible year. A lot of people lost their loved ones, lost jobs, business, or motivation. The situation we were in, we are still in at a lot of places, produced many bad things. But also a lot of good things. And even though the social distancing was often enforced I feel like it often brought us together even more. This book is one of the products of the pandemic and it proves that even bad situations can produce something good.

Matt Day is a photographer and video-maker from Ohio Chillicothe and on his YouTube channel, he posts all sorts of content about photography. That is where I found about his project, Social Distancing. Even though this zine is already sold out you can at least grab a subscription to his YouTube channel, which by the way is free.

Now, Social Distancing is an interesting project because it was announced for pre-sale even before a single photograph was taken. Matt gave himself 30 days to deliver a zine documenting the situation in his home town which is an interesting approach that I see every now then that produces interesting results. I wonder if I would be able to force myself to do something like this by putting a clock on myself?

Matt was donating all the profits to the local food bank. That is great and it also showed me another way that a documentary photographer can make themselves useful in situations like this.

The zine has 15 pages and 19 photographs taken on film as Matt is primarily a film photographer.

The images are nicely paired in this small square zine and even though Chillicothe is a completely different town than where I live, I just couldn't help feel there is something the places have in common. Even though the architecture, streets, cars, and shops are pretty different. It made me realise that this situation is pretty much the same almost anywhere in the world. It does not matter whether you live in a big crowded city, or just a small town, we are all being impacted in some sort of way.

This project, this zine, is a great documentation, not only for the future generations who will hopefully not have to deal with something of this scale again but also for us so we remember that sometimes life can be unpredictable and it can put obstacles in our way and what we take from that is up to us.