by Louisa McDonald

Today, as clubs and bars bustle with life and the streets teem with people going about their daily lives, it is easy to forget the days of the pandemic, when life as we knew it drew to a standstill. For almost two years, even the most familiar places felt unfamiliar as their usual liveliness was replaced by a strange paralysis. Even as everything began to slowly open up again, it was a long time before anything felt close to normal: we would shiver in the rain over a takeaway cup rather than sit in a cosy coffee shop; we would sit several meters away from each other with the windows wide open when someone came to visit. Between total lockdown and everything being restored more or less to normal, there was a strange liminal period of everything being not quite back to normal; the streets of the towns and cities we had once loved felt not quite empty, not quite full – a strange midway-point between normality and desertion.

In this series of photographs, taken in 2021 at a time where there was no full lockdown in place, but everything was still not quite back to normal as Omicron loomed, I have tried to explore how the character of Summertown, a suburb of Oxford, changed to the point where it was not quite recognisable anymore to someone like me, who had grown up in the area and had attended school in Summertown many years before. I have explored this notion not only through the subject matter I have chosen – the coffee shops, restaurants, and streets in the area which once represented bustling city life and now appear half-deserted – but also through playing with the colours through editing. My choice to bring out some colours in the photographs and leave the rest as monochrome was intended to reflect the inconsistent, patchy way in which life returned to normal following the worst years of the pandemic; furthermore, it aimed to replicate the uncanny feeling of a familiar world appearing unfamiliar since so much of its essential aspects are missing. Without people to animate the streets, a city loses its character; it feels equivalent to the city appearing in black-and-white, with only some colours visible.