Jeff Smudde

In the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic, most Americans were locked inside, meanwhile I was a journalist, anxiously wandering the landscape of central Illinois around these uncertain times. When I was home, I found myself looking at the sky dance with itself. The clouds and sunlight over the stage of the neighboring building outside my window were my medicine. I began to make photographs on one camera pointed North, the neighboring buildings skidding across the bottom of the frame. I began to make friends within the sky as I was locked inside of my brick-walled apartment in the late Spring of 2020.

Exactly three years later, I tested positive for COVID-19 for the first time. Through the stress and dread that was inevitable through contracting the virus, I revisited these old friends in my new home of Massachusetts. I set up the same camera, pointed East out of my window but this time with black and white film. I made ten more images in 2023 for this series to act as closure for this time that never felt resolved. The vibrancy of the 2020 color photographs and the calmness of the new monochromatic photographs of 2023 felt a resonance for me.

The virus and all of its heartbreak, anger, fear, uncertainty, had ultimately helped me see a light of peace and hope in this fearful silence.

Images made in 2020 and 2023