When I was told that NYU would be fully online for the remainder of the spring 2020 semester, something didn’t sit right with me. I had said goodbye to some friends but didn’t have the chance to see others before leaving. Now I am miles apart from them without a date to meet again. I moved back to L.A., realizing I wouldn’t be able to have anymore NYC photoshoots with my friends anytime soon.
Quarantine turned from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, and the list of things to do at home was getting shorter every day. It wasn’t until I saw the FaceTime photoshoot of Bella Hadid for Vogue Italia that something clicked. Rather than give up my passion for photography, I thought this was the chance to transform my practice and adapt to the new reality. This is how I ended up holding Zoom photoshoots with my college and high school friends for this project. I’m not going to lie, the shoots weren’t easy. We had to deal with bad WiFi and terrible lighting. At first, those mishaps annoyed me, but as I became more comfortable with the application as an artistic tool, I felt that I didn’t have to fix those things. The blurs, the dots, the lines — all those elements added to the uniqueness of this creative medium.
This is a selection of black and white photographs that came to be from over a dozen Zoom photo sessions that I held over the summer. Nothing was premeditated. I let my subjects play a major role in the creation process and come up with poses and props as we shot. In between poses and after the shoots, we would talk about anything and everything. How’s quarantine in [insert place here] going? Are you still in touch with [insert name here]? Oh my god, remember when [insert anecdote here] happened? In a way, the photoshoots became an excuse for me to connect with people that I had meant to stay in touch with but couldn’t due to the circumstances. From New York to Chicago and Zambia to Peru, my subjects were everywhere and shared a little piece of their lives in these photos.
A version of this article appeared in the Monday, Sept. 21, 2020, e-print edition. Email Alejandra Arevalo at [email protected].