What’s the story behind your award winning series?
The covid-19 pandemic took a serious effect on the everyday life of my family. As a father of four the closing of schools and daycares, home education and generally the long closeness was a great challenge, while working in one of the biggest shopping centre of Europe my job and with this, the main income of my family was in danger. The lockdown of the borders made my situation even more complicated: getting to my workplace in Austria from Hungary as a daily commuter got very unsure; sometimes I had to wait in lines for hours in traffic jams at the border.
Besides all this negative effects, the lockdown caused also a lot of positive outcome. Since I started working 20 years ago, I never had the chance to spend so much time tight-drawn together with my family, which is in hindsight quite a scary recognition… We have spent a lot of time on learning, playing, reading, watching movies, cleaning, gardening, resting, all the everyday things… together! Things we should have expend much more time before the pandemic. It was a very eye opening experience that we should take with us, as life gets back to the so called “normality”.
I wanted to ease this duality of the situation, the contradiction between financial insecurity, claustrophobia and the never before experienced amount of quality time spent together with my beloved family. I took my camera and documented the whole 6 weeks of our family lockdown. The result is a family album with a twist.
This period of time was a self awareness training and a family therapy at the same time, and a great opportunity to re-evaluate a lot of things.
The photographs are all analog, self developed and scanned at home.
What challenges did you come across while shooting this series?
The main challenge was not to be a pain in the ass for my family:) It can be very disturbing if someone is around with a camera all the time.
What does this story mean to you and others?
To me it’s a deeply personal project and I think my approach makes relevant for others too. It could be interesting to others to see how a situation like a lockdown affects the life of such a big family.
Attila Gazso won a Judges Choice award for his series, Lockdown Diary. You can view the full series HERE, find more of Attilas’ work at https://attilagazso.com/ and on Instagram @766attila_gazso667
* The photos included in this article include images from the wider edit of Lockdown Diary, found on Attila’s website.
