Walking Under Quarantine: Shadows

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.

Day 1, Sunday: The first day was cloudy so I thought there wouldn’t be any shadows but there were. The snow revealed them.

Day 2, Monday: Another skier passed by as I was snapping the photo. We kept our distance but greeted each other and she connected with my shadow.

Day 3, Tuesday: Snowshoe tracks, their outlines etched in shadow and sunshine.

Day 4, Wednesday: A bracing day of wind and rain but the sun came out late in the afternoon, creating shadows in half melted tracks..

Day 5, Thursday: After the rain it froze again, a thin layer of ice coating the street. Most of it disappeared in the morning sunshine but in the shadows it melted more slowly from underneath, globules of water squeezing their way down the hill.

Day 6, Friday: It was another cloudy day and I was thinking I could still photograph the shadows on the ice. Only when posting at the end of the day did it occur to me that they aren’t shadows, they’re reflections!

Day 7, Saturday: shortcut through the trees