Feeling antsy and creatively stifled during the COVID-19 pandemic, fine art photographer Ari Salomon decided to document the historic moment with his camera.
At first, he photographed boarded-up windows and other signs of the times, but then turned his focus to one ubiquitous thing: the social distancing markers popping up on pavement and floors everywhere. Since then, he’s photographed the markers from near his home in San Francisco’s Mission District to as far away as Japan and Australia, “basically everywhere I’ve gone in the last five years,” he says. “My focus was on capturing the commonalities of the marks while also highlighting the creativity and individuality in their designs,” he says of his series “6 Feet Apart,” which has been exhibited at several art galleries.
Salomon used his iPhone to capture the images while he was out and about, which adds to their everyday feel. To reflect the once-in-a-lifetime, enormous magnitude of the pandemic, he knew he needed to photograph as many markers as possible. As he gathered photos, he categorized them by shape. Eventually, Salomon began focusing on markers that showed wear over the years, reflecting “the fatigue I felt after hunting down so many of these,” he says. “Once I started to build them into installations, I was glad to have a large library to work with.”
He assembled the photos into various groups: vertical, horizontal, cropped square and round, and large and small. “I also embraced the theme of distress by allowing people to walk on the images during the exhibition,” he explains, “and later framed these faded, scratched, and torn prints as a metaphor for disease, death, and caring for others.”
Salomon says the project made him recognize the power of repetition in photography. “I’m glad the series captures this specific moment in time and this epic-scale group experience that is already fading.”
Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.
