Corona Street Project by Brian Homer (website | Flickr | Instagram):
There are few upsides to the current health situation across the globe but I discovered one and it was literally right on my doorstep. As soon as it became obvious that due to our age my wife and I would have to start self-isolating an idea popped into my head.
Since 1979 and Handsworth Self Portrait which I did with Derek Bishton and John Reardon I’ve been doing other self-portrait projects and was fully intending on helping to build on the already good community spirit in our suburban road in Birmingham UK by doing self-portraits.
But the onset of the virus made that impossible so it was a short creative step to think of doing portraits of the people in the street at their doorways with me at a safe social distance in the street or on their drive or front garden. I hoped this would show a sense of people under the lock down.
Fortunately, as well as good relations in the street, a neighbour had set up a WhatsApp group for us and most of the street of 25 houses were on it. So that made it easy to set up the short photographic sessions with each family without knocking on their doors.
Early on and after a quick test on my own doorway I decided to use my 85mm Nikon 1.8 G lens on my Nikon Z6 as that gave a good safe distance while avoiding distracting diverging verticals on the homes. Years ago I had done a project trying to stitch together a street scene using a 28mm lens and fallen foul of perspective.
