I miss my old routine. There was no regular Spring college/prep school sports schedule this year. My regular hospital clients didn’t have much time for anything other than coping with Covid. My academic clients closed their books. I heard from my editorial clients occasionally, but the smaller magazines had a lot of “contributed” photos, and the newspaper work all but disappeared.
Of course this hurt financially, but I’m surprised at how it hurt emotionally. I’m surprised I felt like I was going through a kind of withdrawal.
I’m accustomed to packing-up my gear and hitting a bunch of assignments a week...and I miss it. I miss the ritual of getting my stuff together the night before and leaving it by the front door. Of getting on the road and accomplishing the first major task of the day - getting wherever I’m going on-time. Of showing-up, actually shaking some hands, and thinking “I’ve got this,” even though the location is, “Whatever you think will work,” the time allotted has gone from 45-minues to about 20, and the first thing out of my subject’s mouth is, “I just want you to know I HATE having my picture taken!” (Yeah…you and everyone else. More about this in a future blog.)
There’s always a little rush, a little excitement and anxiety before any shoot…no matter what it is. Then there’s the bigger stuff. The hard-hit line-drive foul ball that went EXACTLY where I’d been set-up a minute ago. The lacrosse over-time where there will be one team celebrating and one team mourning and all I want is to get both in the same shot. The emotional news or feature assignment that, if it goes just right, will make someone pause when they see it.
I didn’t realize the intensity of the emotions I felt shooting all the time, of producing, and I certainly didn’t know how it would effect me when it up and vanished.
But Covid brought normalcy to a screeching halt, and suddenly Covid was pretty-much the only story…and the story everyone was covering. But really, how many photos of nurses in masks can the market use? How many images does the world need of empty aisles where there used to be toilet paper? Covid was a huge story, but it’s difficult to cover from a financial and a safety standpoint. It isn’t an event that is happening in one place. It’s everywhere, and every local media around the world is covering it primarily on a local level.
The George Floyd protests were another nationwide event that was heavily covered locally. Though I covered more than a few, I wasn’t about to delude myself that a photo from a relatively small protest in Connecticut was going to bump a photo of burning cars in Minneapolis or Los Angeles. So I was there out of a need to be there. To document what was happening not because I had a nice assignment, but because it’s what I do and I don’t want it happening without me. Yes it was intense at times, but somehow it’s not the same when I don’t have a photo editor somewhere checking-in and I’m eating a slice of pizza in my car while I edit and transmit on a deadline. I miss someone depending upon me to do my job.
I shot for my agency, but I’m not waiting for the cash to roll-in. Any photograper who’s ever gotten a check from their agency that included $1.13 from some Eastern European website knows what I’m talking about.
So Covid continues, my phone is quiet, I’m working on some self-generated stuff, and I’m really tired of digging through and scanning film from 20 years ago.
But at least now there’s one thing I absolutely know for sure…the reason I never thoroughly cleaned and organized my office wasn’t because I didn’t have the time.
March for Tolerance, Hamden, CT; Black Lives Matter, New Haven, CT; Removal of Christopher Columbus statue, New Haven, CT. (C) 2020 Stan Godlewski
Self-generated story on Corona Cocktail soda.
What the world needed, another photo of shelves emptied of toilet paper. (C) 2020 Stan Godlewski
Class photo of graduating hospital residents (C) 2020 Stan Godlewski
Yes…everyone is inconvenienced and has something to howl about. (C) 2020 Stan Godlewski.