2020: A Year In Photos
My fifth year of doing one of these summaries, taking stock of a year behind me with a picture a month and the things I enjoyed from each. I’ve written this over the course of December, a month that has wildly fluctuated from calm and positivity in Berlin to panic and pessimism on return to Tier 4 London, to a quiet hopefulness in this magic gap between Christmas and New Year. An accurate distillation of the journey of 2020.
January
The Rodin Museum in Paris.
I started with old friends and turning 27, first adventures in my dark room and playing football with beloved GDFC, with taking my girlfriend to Paris for one of the best weekends I’ve had in that city, and a similarly glorious one in Berlin with friends, with seeing art and making art. I did this month as if it were the only one in which life could be lived to the full, and I applaud myself for it.
top film: Long Day’s Journey Into Night (地球最后的夜晚)
top book: Help The Witch, Tom Cox
top theatre: Love Hurts in Tinder Times, Berlin Schaubuhne
top art: Peter Hujar, Jeu de Paume
February
Tea at the Barbican. Kellie often jokes I organise all my plans around nice places to sit quietly for a while, something that does not exist in lockdown
My diary tells me I worked a lot this month, at The Yard and elsewhere. I ate a lot of good food and warmed friends’ new houses, and saw some of my favourite cinema of recent years.
top film: Portrait of A Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu)
top book: Suite Venetienne, Sophie Calle
top theatre: Swive, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
top art: Charlotte Salomon, Jewish Museum
March
Our neighbour’s cat, my greatest pandemic friend, sleeping beside me like a croissant as I write this
Strange and otherworldly - for me, for the planet. I squeezed in a weekend in Belgium seeing my cousin and some highly-anticipated art, and final visits to the cinema and the theatre before everything went dark. I got very ill, with what I now suspect was The Ill. I made a snap decision move in with my mum as the WhatsApp rumours of instant lockdown circulated, where I made a new and beloved friend and felt immensely lucky to be somewhere peaceful and calm with the stability to find it so.
top film: And Then We Danced (Da cven vicekvet)
top theatre: Freedom Hi, Vault Festival
top art: The Ghent Altarpiece (mainly The Mystic Lamb), St Bavas Cathedral
April
Is spring this perfect every year, or do I just never look up
Life felt like a straightforward blend of morning walks, afternoon runs and a new approach to working life. The weather made evenings feel long and luxurious, and there was suddenly limitless time available to organise all of my 35mm, make hot cross buns across continents, and produce ridiculous crafts. The blossom emerged overhead then descended underfoot, we cooked delicious things, we drank buckets of negronis, and I spent a lot of time online with my football team who were a lockdown saviour.
top film: Stranger by the Lake (L'Inconnu du lac)
top book: Salt Slow, Julia Armfield
top art: my own drawing of a still from Portrait of a Lady on Fire for my football team’s weekly drawing class
May
A beautiful lemon that I photographed so much it went on to become my first run of fine art prints later in the year
An intense month of screentime with my colleagues, and also with my WHSmith pencils. I took unstoppable quantities of pictures, went for runs in golden hour, savoured the sun. Things felt both routine and anxiety-inducing as the rules began to change and everyone’s behaviour with them. I started seeing friends at a distance, and I returned to Hackney.
top film: Water Lilies (Naissance des Pieuvres)
top theatre: Dear Ireland, Abbey Theatre
June
Picking up takeaway pints and aperol spritz to drink in Clapton after a long walk in the countryside
I took a last minute month of furlough alongside the rest of my organisation. It was a blessing to have the time and the space to do other sorts of work and I read, watched, had conversations, went to workshops, planned how to take the enormous energy everywhere forward into the every day. I saw Kellie for the first time since mid-March, saw friends outside, did my first round of socially-distanced headshots. I gave an online presentation to my football team about the impact of historical pandemics on social order. I had my phone stolen.
top film: The Watermelon Woman
top book: Happiness, Aminatta Forna
July
A sunset sea on the way to France
Return to art, return to my dark room, return to the pub, socially-distanced summer activities like barbecues and brunch and patting animals and the seaside and travel abroad. A month that felt as though the worst was over, that whatever we’d been told about a dreadful winter everything was in fact going to be fine, that safely-conducted normal life could resume and plans could be made with confidence. All utter delusion looking back from December.
top film: Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
top book: Beloved by Toni Morrison
top art: Gordon Parks, Alison Jacques Gallery
August
My aunt in Charroux, a village untouched by the pandemic.
A month of endings and not-quite-endings. I said my final physical goodbye to my workplace of 3 years and my flat of 3 years. I got so burnt at the seaside that the tan-lines are still there, sat in lots of gardens and porches and bid farewell to East London. I enjoyed another week of sun and baguettes with my family in France, then an admin-heavy unplanned quarantine back in the UK.
top film: A White White Day (Hvítur, hvítur dagur)
top book: The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante
September
Kellie and I on the way up to what turned out to be a private flat in Marylebone, looking for glass art
Two weeks of isolation, with much-welcomed visits from beloved West Londoners (and beloved cat). Final dreamy days art-hunting in central London and vampire-hunting in Yorkshire. A fortnight finishing the last of my work in one of my favourite cities with some of my favourite people.
top film: the BBC’s 1989 The Woman In Black which was not good but Kellie hunted down on the internet for me and we watched it with donuts in bed in our hotel
top book: The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
top theatre: Masha took me to The Bridge to see socially distanced Alan Bennett starring Kristen Scott Thomas and it was a pleasure to be in a theatre again
top art: Alec Soth’s series i know how furiously your heart is beating in tandem with Johnny Pitt’s Afropean, Foam Gallery in Amsterdam
October
Masha driving us through Germany at breakneck speeds (German motorways have no speed limit).
Goodbye to Amsterdam, hello to Berlin. A glorious month of exploring the art, food and freedom of a city I love with new friends and old. We snuck in an incredibly spooky roadtrip before the continent shut down again, which I wrote about in more detail here.
top film: Creep 2 with Desiree Akhavan
top book: The Colour Purple by Alice Walker, with intro from the author absolutely eviscerating the film adaptation
top art: playing with lasers with my aunt at Amsterdam’s new NXT Museum
November
Sunday morning on the airfield with a friend, a picture I feel says a lot about Berlin
Germany entered lockdown - less severe than the UK, but a lockdown nonetheless. I spent my time marching across the city or looking out onto it, having numb-handed lunches by the canal, coffees on the Feld and Glühwein in unlit streets. Daylight hours shrank and we all shrank inside. I got to know new friends over dinners, I learnt to code, I read voraciously across books and papers and the internet, lived in the kitchen, watched online lecture series and Netflix and wrote and wrote and wrote. I found headspace that I hope to keep.
top film: The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography
top book: Afropean by Johnny Pitts
top art: I started a new Instagram account purely for sharing + looking at 35mm photography which introduced me to lots of brilliant European analogue photographers
December
Goodbye Berlin
I came home for Christmas, with a thank you to Berlin for the time and space and perspective. Living abroad relentlessly challenges the image our irrelevant island retains of itself, relentlessly hammered home by the chaos I returned to. I did have to do a full quarantine, but friends and their pets once again came to my doorstep. We did have to suddenly cancel our plans to go up to York, but had a quiet and lovely Christmas at home, with coffees from our local coffee shop and chilly glasses of garden champagne with our neighbours. There was sun by the river and a cat on the sofa and piles of books to read and one or two gifts that made me feel so known and so perceived that I wanted to laugh and to cry. The people I love are in this country, and there remain things to love about it.
In this nothing period between Christmas and new year everything feels possible, while simultaneously a write-off. I feel much the same about 2021.
top film: Ponyo
top book: We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Shirley Jackson
top art: my street’s Christmas lights, who really went hard this year for all the kids on the road (and the adults too)