The Lost Years

While reviewing 2021 recently for this blog, I noted a glaring hole in site updates spanning all of 2020. Fifteen silent months, in fact, from August 2019 through January 2021. 

The elephant in the room is obviously Coronavirus, which consumed society for most of 2020, but this doesn’t entirely explain the silence on this blog. I stopped blogging in August 2019, seven months before we knew anything of the upcoming lockdowns and travel restrictions. My blogging earlier in 2019 had certainly been sporadic, too.

It turns out that from my last blog entry, in the middle of Q3/2019 to my next blog entry at the beginning of Q1/2021, I got my camera out on just 105 days to shoot a measly 2,790 photos. Looking over the entirety of 2019, I only shot 7,500 photos from beginning to end. For comparison, in 2021, I shot more than seventeen thousand photos, over the course of 243 of the 365 days.

2019: The Stall

Despite the limited updates on my blog in 2019, the year itself for me was actually very busy. Not with photography, though. My dad’s failing health was slowly beginning to have an impact around this time. He’d reduced the amount of driving he was doing and so I was spending more of my time travelling the 45 minutes to Haworth, doing his shopping, running errands for him etc. The time available to pursue my hobby shrank proportionally.

So an argument can be made that there are essentially two lost years here, with 2019 being influenced by a shift in focus driven by personal circumstances and 2020 being silenced even further by additional external forces.

2020: The Lost Year

2020 was a year of silence on this blog. There was almost nothing relevant to the thrust of this blog to report. Instead, my time was mostly spent dotting between lockdown at home and caring for my dad.

Though I didn’t achieve much photography during 2020, I did make a small effort to document some of the notable features of the periods of full lockdown. The fact that parks were closed, that everybody was required to stay at home and not leave their house and that there existed, for a time, an extraordinary air of uncertainty. Looking back, it’s difficult to believe the level of radical change in our lives that we undertook, but I do have some photographic evidence of it – not much, I admit – but a small record of my own experiences from an unprecedented moment in history. The Lockdown 20 project’s main page can be found here.