Writers’ Hour
When the pandemic arrived in the early in 2020 the London Writers' Salon were faced with the choice of stopping their workshops, masterclasses and support for writers, or going online. They experimented in March 2020 with meeting on Zoom.
The format was simple. Writers from all walks of life meet up on Zoom at 8am every morning, set their goals for the hour and then write, in silence, on Zoom. The zoom camera gives accountability. The feeling of being together, yet alone, gives writers the sense of community.
By the time Tom first joined the group during the third lockdown early in 2021, the group had grown from 25 people in the first week to over 300 in the UK and 800 people from around the globe taking part over 4 different time zones.
Tom, originally joined for something to do during the dark January days of the lockdown but quickly became fascinated with the faces of people concentrating on work and seemingly unaware and unselfconscious of others watching them via Zoom.
A chance conversation with one of the writers gave him the idea to try and photograph people during the morning sessions. Using a remote camera app on the subject's mobile phone called Shutter App, he got the subjects to set up their mobile phone camera so it matched exactly the view he saw on Zoom. Then during the Writers' Hour, he would photograph them while they wrote.
The portraits are a snapshot of an hour in a writer's life. Speaking to the subjects afterwards almost all of them say they forgot the presence of the camera and carried on as they would normally.
The result is 64 candid natural unposed portraits. Some people were focused on the screen barely moving for an hour as they typed away on their computers. Some had writer's block and spent most of the hour staring out the window. Some wrote in their journals. A few showed their frustration and one or two cried.
The images in the series, presented here like a zoom screen, show a community of writers, working together, yet alone.
