Instagram becomes an online art gallery for a world in isolation

One of the images in the Ballarat International Foto Biennale. Adam and Will, by Bri Hammond.

A casserole pot sits outside a front door, the gesture of a friendly neighbour. Lonely figures in lockdown stand at their windows, watching the nothing-going-on outside. Roads, bridges, railway stations and other places of transportation and commerce are deserted, devoid of human life and the comforting ordinariness of everyday activity.

These are just some of the images filtering through social media during the interminable days of COVID-19. We are acutely aware, aren’t we, of the strangeness of the time. There’s a sense of history being lived, a collective understanding that this global lockdown is a once-in-a-century event. And, naturally enough, we want to record the experience that is at once felt so individually and also affects everyone we know.

Recently, when Portia Smith was driving from Melbourne to visit her elderly mother in Macedon, she spotted an illuminated traffic sign that read: “Autumn leaves closed.” The mixture of bureaucratic bluntness and poetic whimsy tickled her sense of lockdown-induced absurdity. She got out of the car, and took a photo.

“You can’t actually close an autumn leaf,” she says, as if a leaf were just another shuttered store, roped-off beach or darkened theatre. “It will curl and fall, and the seasons will change no matter what. The coronavirus is terrible and then we are also dealing with a layer of government intervention in our daily activities. That sign just summed it all up for me.”

Smith’s photo, taken with her iPhone and posted on Instagram, is one of thousands of lockdown-related images that have been submitted in recent weeks to the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.

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In a project called Mass Isolation Australia (#massisolationaus), the biennale is curating an online exhibition of images from the pandemic, which will be part of an installation at the biennale next year. So far, more than 2600 pictures have been submitted by professional snappers and amateur photojournalists who have captured scenes of their unnaturally repressed home lives and strangely dormant suburbs and cities.

Not surprisingly, there is a pervasive atmosphere of quietude, even melancholy, in the images selected for the biennale’s Instagram display. Selfies — the lingua franca of social media — are few; people instead are looking outside of themselves and at the world around them, noticing the effect that social distancing is having on their loved ones and neighbours. To use a term posted by one of the photographers, we’ve entered the world of isolationships.

The online images have been curated by Shaohui Kwok and Amelia Saward, who have loosely arranged them by subject and theme. As the eye wanders across the array, it picks up threads of shared meaning and experience.

Lunch with my 12 year old, Nicola Stephenson @nicola_stephenson., Instagram

A sequence of pictures shows deserted transport hubs; another of solitary figures in face masks. Pictures of food and drink — a single serving of avocado on toast, a glass of orange juice — add notes of colour, warmth and nourishment.

There is playfulness and whimsy, too, such as the snapshot of a naked man standing, arms outstretched, on the footpath of Lygon Street, Brunswick. “When nothing is ‘normal’ anymore, what is normal?” the photographer, @quarantineheart, writes in the comments. In several of the pictures, the photographer’s silhouette is visible, and the lengthening late-autumn shadows seem to underscore the solitariness of the scene.

What’s been interesting for the curators since they began sifting and collating is that the images’ mood and subject are evolving.

“Early on, we saw a lot of photos of very empty public spaces — empty train stations and city streets,” Saward says. “It was a feeling of shock. Then we started to see images that were in people’s homes, their family life. We really want this to be an archive that documents the Australian experience and how COVID-19 affects us on a local level.”

The idea of capturing a visual record of the coronavirus and lockdown happened, aptly enough, during a self-imposed quarantine. Fiona Sweet, director of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, had been at the FotoFest photography festival in Houston in early March when Australia started to impose restrictions on travel and movement. Sweet curtailed her four-week visit to the US and flew home to Melbourne, where she locked herself away for the mandated fortnight.

Sweet is not a professional photographer, but she habitually takes photographs using her smartphone. She took a photo every day she was in quarantine, wanting to beguile the time and also to make a visual diary to send to her friends. She describes the scene from her window in Melbourne’s Elwood.

“There was a wonderful moment: I was staring out the window, and there was a lonely man walking — not on the footpath, but in the middle of the road — carrying a super-pack of toilet paper,” she says. “I wish I’d photographed that. It was when the school holidays had just started, so there were lots of children cycling up and down.”

In Britain, the Format photography festival had started an online project called Mass Isolation, inviting people to document their experience of the COVID-19 crisis. Sweet discussed the idea with Format’s director, Louise Fedotov-Clements, and knew she wanted to capture the Australian experience in a similar way. The BIFB is now one of the Format’s international partners in Mass Isolation, which in turn traces its origins to an intriguing project from the 1930s.

Mass Observation was a hobby that became almost a social movement in Britain during the years immediately before and after World War II. People were asked to keep diaries, take photographs and capture what one of the organisers, Charles Madge, called the “essence of the time”.

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Madge had divined what he thought was a pivotal moment in 1936 when, within days, the Crystal Palace in London burned down and Edward VIII abdicated the throne. On the day of George VI’s coronation, May 12, 1937, Madge and his collaborators commissioned a team of on-the-ground observers, sending them out across London to capture the public mood.

It was largely a social experiment to record the lives of ordinary Britons; less to do with scientific anthropology or market research, and more spontaneous and even literary in its objectives. Mass Observation continued into World War II, when the project came to be seen in some quarters as yet another official intrusion into the private lives of citizens.

Sweet says the Mass Isolation photography project is not about spying on one’s neighbours, but shares with the 1930s project a desire to bottle some of that “essence of the time”.

“It’s a different project, but it’s still the idea of social observation,” she says. “What they did was have questionnaires and recorded conversations — it wasn’t strictly photographic. They had volunteers going out and documenting how people lived at this particular time and place, England in the 1930s. It came from an academic background with anthropologists and novelists and painters getting involved.

“The idea of recording the (coronavirus) lockdown through the photographic medium was perfect … Photography has become much more democratic, now more than ever. Lots of people are photographers who are not classically trained.”

Mass Isolation Australia is the latest project of the BIFB, which in recent years has stepped up its public engagement programs. The biennial photographic exhibition was founded in Daylesford by Jeff Moorfoot in 2005, and moved to Ballarat as it quickly gained traction with the exhibition-going public in regional Victoria.

Sweet, a graphic designer by training, was appointed director in 2016 and made her mark at her inaugural 2017 festival by featuring the hyper-stylised work of US photographer and music-video director David LaChapelle. She has moved to secure a permanent place for the biennale, and for photography generally, by purchasing a former bank building in Ballarat, which has become the National Centre for Photography. The biennale paid $1.2m for the building and raised almost $850,000 from donors to support the purchase.

“When I came to Ballarat in 2016 it was a much-loved festival and we grew it even more,” she says. “It was really exciting for the community, they wanted more arts in the town, and they were ready for the leap.

Aaron Yeandle’s Colewort-19, @aaron.yeandle, Instagram

“Then we saw the building. We had built up a good relationship with a lot of donors in town, and we said, ‘What do you think?’. They put the money up. We bought the building, and now we have to renovate it, and make it purpose-built for major gallery exhibitions.”

With the Mass Isolation Australia project and other exhibitions, Sweet wants to position the BIFB as a major event, not only in regional Victoria but nationally. The intention is to bridge the gap between photography’s fine art and democratic traditions. When the next biennale is held in August next year, museum-grade photography will be seen alongside a display of thousands of visual impressions of the pandemic, submitted by members of the public.

“There are no guidelines in terms of content: people can photograph whatever they like, while they are in mass isolation,” Sweet says. “We have asked everyone to abide by the government’s COVID-19 rules, so not to engage with masses of people. We also have rules around approval: so you need to have approval of the people you photograph.”

The final form of the Mass Isolation exhibition at next year’s biennale is yet to be determined, but Sweet says the pictures should be presented in their original medium as digital images, rather than made into a conventional photographic display.

For the time being, the collection of photographs is swelling, changing colour and shape — a “behemoth of images”, Sweet calls it — as the nation’s photographers respond to a world and way of life turned upside down by coronavirus.

On the biennale’s Instagram feed, you can see how the tone and subject of the pictures has evolved. The initial novelty of the lockdown and the psychic shock of social distancing have given way to images of remembrance and gratitude. In the days immediately after Anzac Day came pictures of candlelit driveway vigils.

As the viral threat recedes, and restrictions on assembly and movement gradually are relaxed, we may expect images that are less sombre, more light-filled and joyful.

“Who knows how this is going to play out?” Sweet says, speaking at the pointy end of the lockdown. “At the moment people are showing photos of themselves looking out of windows, showing empty streets. I am hoping that we’ll see a shift. In three months’ time, people will be showing different kinds of photos.

“We all know how we feel from day to day, and our ability to stay positive when we are in isolation will be tested … I can’t possibly predict it, but I’m hoping to see a change in the human psyche.”