Historic England Lockdown Collection

Hi all... the Historic England "Lockdown Collection" was launched on Tuesday, and am chuffed to say I had the above pic chosen in it. The collection is a snapshot of life in England during lockdown - you may have seen it covered in various news media (The BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph ) earlier this week. My photograph was entitled "First Day of the Holidays", and was taken on a family bike ride in our local park in Bristol. It was also chosen by the artist Malaika Kegode as the image to represent the South West region of the UK. I took it with the Ricoh GRIII: brilliant, versatile camera - I've used it a lot during lockdown.

Full details from the Historic England Website below:

"On 29 April 2020 Historic England launched Picturing Lockdown, a unique project in which we asked the public to submit photos to document their experiences of one week in lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic.

We received almost 3,000 public submissions from across England, capturing a rich picture of our collective experience in an extraordinary time.

We selected the 100 most evocative, informative and inspiring, added 50 newly commissioned works by 10 contemporary artists and 50 more from Historic England’s photographers to create a final collection to be added to the Historic England Archive.

The call-out was the first time the public have been asked to capture photographs for the Archive since the Second World War."

If you're interested, do have a look at the Full Collection. It’s a pretty eclectic body of work ...

Best

Well done for making the cut.

Well done, you must have an eye for it. But we knew that

Congratulations Bill, I really like the shot it manages to capture a mood/atmosphere. I'm not surprised it was selected twice. The overcast conditions and the wind catching the tape are all components that take it a step above. Compositionally I can see for me it would be a tough one to frame up, cutting a set of swings in half but including the tower block, as others have commented you have a good eye.

Cheers
Nigel

This picture sums up the mood of lockdown to perfection: a windswept and deserted children's play area.
David

Well done Bill..nice image.

Saw this earlier in week on main Epz site...hadn't heard of the competition until I read about the winners.

The thing that really makes it is the red and white 'police' tape as mentioned by Nigel, prompting the question
of the viewer..."why"..."what has happened that necessitates the closing of a children's playground by officialdom? "

Maybe Historic England could do this sort of thing more regularly to capture the mood of a nation on important dates or periods of time.

regards

Karlo

A well-worthy entrant Bill - capturing the moment and feeling of the start of these times

The red and white tape thrashing around makes such a contrast with the sterility and lack of motion elsewhere. You caught the mood perfectly.

Well done Bill

The sense of overwhelming loneliness/emptiness works just as well here as it does in your landscape work, Bill, leaving us to fill it up as we may. Also, the half present swing on the left discreetly leads our imagination to the unseen world beyond. Thanks for the link, interesting images there too.

Thanks all for thoughts and comments on this... this is in our local park... we were on our first bike ride round it together (we usually get out into the countryside if we can, but couldn’t because of lockdown etc.)... I’d just decided to do a project on lockdown, so was taking the GRiii with me pretty much everywhere... we rode past it and it kind of just leapt out... everything a playground shouldn’t be... I had time to take 4 or 5 grab shots, then we rode on...

Nigel, David, Karlo, David: yes, was a pretty blowy day, so I was waiting for gusts so the tape would help tell that part of the story...

Nigel/ Serge: yes, well spotted on the swing... I had some choices to make re composition (the griii has a 28mm equiv lens), so I couldn’t fit it all in... tried a few different versions, but went with this one in the end... chose the flats, slide, first swing foreground and second swing background as the “button” on the lhs, and the tarmac of the swing rhs as the way in... then waited for the wind...

Thanks again all... hoping it won’t look like this for too much longer...

Best

Respect, man

Jon

Thanks Jon...

Best