The Post-Pandemic Exhibition

Alongside the camera, I’m a qualified frontline healthcare worker. I know burnout and recovery from the inside. The pandemic mostly reached us as numbers: cases, closures, the daily briefing. I wanted the stories the numbers left out. What had getting through actually looked like for people in this city?

For over a year before I’d also been thinking about augmented reality. A photograph can show you someone’s face and the way they hold themselves, but it can’t give you their voice. With AR, you could hold your phone up to a portrait and hear the person in it tell you what happened. That could carry far more of a story than an image on its own.

I know burnout and recovery from the inside.

Many people applied. Five of them became the exhibition.

First, Vikki. She runs Kukuwa UK, dance classes for women, and she is funny and never still. In lockdown, she said, “Corona beer was the only one left on the shelf.” The irony wasn’t lost on her. Then she told me what those months were like for the women in her classes: more isolation, more violence at home, fewer places to go. Her classes became somewhere to forget their troubles, talk, and heal together.

In the evening I went to DiveHu5 to meet Nick. Coffee in the mornings, cocktails at night, barstools worn smooth, regulars nodding hello as we talked. In the middle of the pandemic his bathroom was ripped out, so he showered at a mate’s house “on the sly”. Once, he panicked that he hadn’t washed his hands, because his mate’s girlfriend was pregnant. That’s what the pandemic did. It got into the most ordinary things and filled them with fear.

Just before Christmas, at lunchtime, I photographed Stella in Wilberforce House, where we first met, at the Echoes of Our Heritage exhibition. She founded Black Heritage of Hull, which gave me a sense of belonging in this city. She talked about the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd in the same breath, and about feeling cut off from herself and her community.

Late afternoon, Jo at the Blossom Hub in Princes Quay. She welcomed me with a cup of tea. During the pandemic, after a cluster of suicides in the area, she lay awake one night working out how to make a place where no one had to feel alone. It started in a cabin behind a COVID test centre, serving teas and coffees. When the cameras stopped, Jo told me about the volunteers. They visit people, walk their pets, make the coffee, keep people company. Many of them first came to the hub needing help themselves.

Sally came to the pop-up gallery while we were still unpacking the lights. She photographs babies, children and families as Little Pop Photography. When the pandemic hit, her bookings were cancelled and her work stopped for seven months. “I lost everything,” she told me, without a trace of bitterness. She remembered opening her window and hearing nothing. No traffic, no hum from the city. Just a strange calm.

In one of her portraits, she holds a lens up to her eye and looks straight back at me.

The essay is my version of them. The sound is theirs.

Later that month, doors open at Princes Quay, a shopping centre in the middle of Hull.

So there are ten portraits at A1, two of each person, and beside each one an essay I wrote. The essay is my version of them. The sound is theirs. Hold your phone up to a portrait and you hear them tell it, in their own words. Nick’s comes with his bar behind him: the hum of conversation, a place where people know your name.

At first galleries I approached said no. I was indignant at first but then again I also wanted this work in front of people who don’t usually go to galleries, people who have never felt those rooms were meant for them. Most people still go to the shops. Fewer since the pandemic, admittedly. But still. So PPE opened in a pop-up in Princes Quay, the same shopping centre as Jo’s Blossom Hub.

You could walk in with your shopping, hold your phone up to a portrait, and hear someone from your own city tell you how they got through. You didn’t need to know anything about art.

These are Hull’s stories. They belonged where Hull walks past every day.

Nick said they had done more than adapt. Looking back at all five, he was right.