To stay creatively active and continue their collaborative relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic, photography duo Shaughn and John drew inspiration from the Postal Service—an indie band that mailed CD-Rs to each other, adding to a track until the album was complete.
The duo passed back and forth a journal to each other every week, which evolved into a visual chronicle of the year of the coronavirus pandemic. Collaging with different mediums like newspaper clippings, archival images from publications like National Geographic, and their own film and digital photographs, each page of Stay Home /// The Covid Journal explores the raw emotions and events in 2020 to try to make sense of the many things that were hard to explain.
As the days, weeks, and months of isolation and uncertainty dragged on, Shaughn and John worked on pages in nonsequential order to break down the passage of time that seemed to be never-ending. Layering with different mediums allowed pages to develop as thoughts and feelings intensified about their personal lives and society during COVID-19.
2020 was an incredibly unprecedented year that has challenged us in the most severe ways. The book reveals a thread throughout the year that we should not take for granted: No matter what you experienced and how you coped with the pandemic, the raw emotion from this tumultuous year will never be forgotten.
“What I tried to capture in the journal is to put down the way that it felt to go through [the pandemic]—not just the facts, not just a news story, but what we went through on a personal basis,” John told Fortune. “So hopefully when people look back, they’ll feel some of the emotions we felt when putting this together and trigger the feelings they felt—feelings of anxiety, being uncertain, being confused.”
When the duo first began the project in March 2020, they expected the pandemic to last a few weeks or so. They thought by the time the pandemic was over, they would have made a physical book that they can show people in in-person meetings.
“It just kind of shows how a little bit naive we were and how we really didn’t know how this thing [would] end,” John said.
The duo would drive 50 miles to each other’s homes to drop off the book for the other. They continued their collaboration from a distance, either creating their own pages or building off the other’s unfinished pages. After five years working together as a duo, they’ve built a solid creative foundation. Suddenly not being able to be in the same room or talk in the way they used to made them rely on their past experiences and instincts.
For example, John photographed his pregnant wife and pasted it into the book. He later made a picture of his son once he was born and also pasted it in, but in a separate page. Shaughn saw something special there and placed them together, so the viewer would see the child in his mother’s stomach as if he were still growing in there. John described the image as serendipitous when he saw the creation.
“I think that page kind of represents how the collaboration works, how little pieces of our separate lives were being printed and pasted and joined together in some new way creating a new piece of work that couldn’t have existed without both parts.”
Another way the duo conveyed the pandemic era and gave another layer to their visual journal was through handwritten repetitions that contained words constantly repeated throughout TV, social media, and communities.
“I felt like there was so much repetition of certain words and certain ideas,” Shaughn described. “Because we were at home so engrossed in everything that was happening, it really did become this kind of constant, ‘BLM, BLM, BLM, BLM. PANDEMIC, PANDEMIC, PANDEMIC,’ and all these contradictions of ‘Wear a mask, don’t wear a mask.’”
Shaughn described that so much happened in 2020 with race and politics that it was equally a huge part of what was going on with the coronavirus, and it organically evolved into the journal.
“Suddenly topics that were only partially relevant at the time became really relevant,” Shaughn said.
Their time-capsule journal helped alleviate some of the weight they said they felt from the world. Though the pandemic hasn’t completely come to its own closing pages, the duo felt it was time to wrap up the journal’s.
“We were happy with where this project ended up, and we’re ready to move on,” Shaughn said.
Shaughn and John are a directing and photography duo. You can see more of their work here, and on their Instagram.