Melbourne Camera Club

Club Night: Ruth Woodrow, "Lockdown Imagery" – Clubrooms & Hybrid Meeting
2022-09-15 20:00 - 21:30 (Australia/Melbourne) | Vic
The story this picture tells is both deeply personal and also needed telling. Each image represents a happy memory of time spent walking my neighbourhood with my husband, Paul, over a period of three months, from March to June 2020.
It is a record of my experience of a point in time that will be marked down in history as a societal turning point.
When I found out that I would be working from home during lockdown, I decided that I was going to go for a walk every day for both my mental and physical wellbeing. During my walks I started noticing the various signs and markings on the ground. The lack of people and traffic was making me see many things as if for the first time. Photographing my feet with these signs and markings seemed to be a way that I could capture my experience of lockdown and isolation. Before long, I noticed that I had hundreds of these images and it seemed like a good idea to combine them into a sort of collage.
Taking inspiration from the rainbow, I thought I could arrange the images from red through to violet, but what I discovered was that I didn’t have enough magentas and violets, but I had heaps of grey, so my collage ended up fading from the rainbow through to grey, which talks to me of the gloss and excitement of early lockdown fading into what we now think of as the new normal.

This image is a product of our daily walks during lockdown and I’d like to thank my husband Paul for accompanying me day after day after day on our walks and insisting that I take a camera with me. He “donated” his Leica Q2 to me as it was so much lighter than my Canon. Needless to say, it hasn’t left me since.
This image tells a powerful story of lockdown in Melbourne in 2020. This seat is at the Victorian College of the Arts, normally a bustling vibrant locale full of arts students dressed like arts students.
During our lockdown walks we visited this area quite frequently and to say that it was the opposite of what it was like before lockdown is an understatement. There was no-one there, it was like a ghost town.
The government decided that playgrounds and community facilities – and peculiarly, park benches and seats were off limits and needed to be taped off. What attracted me to this scene was the colour of the seat and wall and the jarring impact of the red and white tape. It was as if art itself was forbidden (which surprisingly almost turned out to be the case).

Please join us in person at the Clubrooms or on Zoom for this event.
Zoom details will be emailed to members a couple of days before the event.
