Lighter side of an unusual year

This was the second wave in Wellington, and a pedestrian was walking past a store window in Cuba St after the city returned to alert level 2 in August, when mask-wearing became compulsory. It was compulsory on buses and trains and public transport but more and more people were starting to wear them generally.

I don’t know if the store is new but I’d not seen it before. I was just out looking for whatever I could find. People were coming back out – some were wearing masks, some were not.

I probably waited about half an hour for the shot. It was a weekend. I spent quite a lot of time getting people as they walked past. Most of them were just fails.

This one, the guy has a fairly casual demeanour and the way he’s wearing his mask and holding his shoulders, it just kind of worked. He was relaxing and then all these people in the posters were in shock horror. It spoke to the fear of the coronavirus coming back. That unknown fear of, what are we getting back into?

It was great to document something real. Something presented itself that was totally different from normal life.

What was so extraordinary was how quite quickly it became ordinary for people: wearing masks, wearing gloves, queueing up. That was before QR codes came in. Everybody was adapting to this crazy life.

We were out and about all the time as essential workers but you didn’t want to get too close to people and you didn’t want to interact. It’s difficult from a work point of view.

But it was also fascinating. Most of the people were really good when you photographed them but I had quite a lot of abuse too.

People didn’t want to be photographed, or you took their photograph, and they just hit the roof, basically. I got threatened. All the works, really. But that’s aminor part of it. Most people were great.