We are lucky to live in a place where we can still go out even while under quarantine. I heard from somebody in China that they have to stay in because of the density of the population. Meanwhile, the weather here has been great for outdoor activities and we have lots of space for social distancing. I joined a group started by Boston artist Heather Kapplow, in which we get an emailed walking prompt once a week and can share with others after doing it. Here’s this week’s prompt:
Sometime within the next 7 days, take a 30-40 minute walk where your focus is the shadows in your environment. Look at them much closer than usual—contemplate them as if they were separate things from whatever is casting them. Get close enough to experience their temperature difference from non-shadows. Spend a lot of time with one shadow, or a little bit of time with a lot of shadows. Capture something about one or all of them for us and post here after your walk: photos of their strangeness, words about how they made you feel, sound or video that synchs up nicely with them, sketches of them or impressions of them made in some other way. Anything that makes sense to you as a response to a full 30-40 minutes of focusing entirely on shadows.
I modified it by doing it every day and sometimes skiing instead of walking since we still have too much snow to walk without skis or snowshoes. Here are some of the photos I took with my iPhone, all mid or late afternoon but, of course, different light and shadows on different days.
Wunderkamera 