A moment in history: Photographer captures pandemic

SAN DIEGO — The kids were still in their pajamas. Dad hadn’t shaved. Mom looked tired.

Perfect time for a Pandemic Portrait.

The Nichols family milled around their front yard in Carlsbad, Calif., while photographer John Riedy set up a camera and light stand. When he was ready, they assembled on the lawn and Riedy snapped away.

His commercial photography business — corporate head shots, weddings, real estate portfolios — has cratered in the coronavirus pandemic, so Riedy is staying busy taking pictures of families that he hopes will say something about this particular moment in time, when everyone’s lives are at risk and hunkering down is a way to stay safe.

“I started out calling them ‘Pandemic Portraits,’ but now I think ‘Time Capsule Portraits’ might be better,” Riedy said. “It’s capturing families during this historic event: where they were, what they wore, who they were with.”

NOT USUAL TIMES

Family portraits are usually a time for dressing up, for getting your hair done, for going into studios where the lighting is perfect and any flaws can be edited out before the prints are made. These are not usual times. “That’s what I like about this,” Delia Nichols said after Riedy had finished photographing her family April 9. “This is real life. This is how we look every day right now, in jammies and old clothes. A picture like this will help us remember.”

Riedy, 50, has done about two dozen of the portraits. He started by reaching out to existing clients and offering them family pictures for free. Word of mouth brought him to others, who pay $50 for the shots — just enough to cover his expenses, Riedy said.

“I hope I’ve overblown the significance of this moment and in no time we’re back into our old lives,” Riedy wrote in a blog post explaining the project. “I hope. But if not, I hope those who opened up to me in this time of crisis will be glad they did someday.”

Riedy got the idea from a photography friend, Paul Gero, who took portraits for free of his neighbors in Wisconsin, many of them standing in the windows of their homes.

Gero shot them there, with a zoom lens, for safety reasons, but also because the behind-the-glass feel of the portraits speaks to the isolation that’s been forced on people by a microbe they can’t see.

When Gero started, he thought maybe 20 families would be interested. He wound up with more than 100 of what he calls “Portraits in the Time of Corona” and has stopped doing more, at least for now, while he processes the pictures already taken.

IT’S SAFER OUTDOORS

Riedy’s pictures of families have all been taken outdoors, because that says something about the Southern California locale, and because it’s safer than him going inside. He said he’s been observing covid-19 guidelines, keeping his distance and, starting in early April, wearing a mask.

He describes his approach as “hands-off.” He doesn’t tell people what to wear or how to pose. “Show me who you are, right now,” he tells them. He doesn’t retouch the photos later.

So it was that the Nichols family — Delia, Drew and their children, Sarah, 11; Jacob, 8; Anna, 5; and Claire, 2 — put a couple of lawn chairs in their yard, where they’ve been having the occasional socially distanced happy hour with neighbors. The parents sat in the chairs and the children on the ground — except for Claire, who straddled a bike.

A soccer ball was on the lawn behind them, a suggestion of how at least some of the long hours at home are being passed.

Other families have arranged themselves on front porches, back patios, and, in one case, a hot tub. One family included reminders of the panic-buying that has accompanied this time in history: a case of bottled water and a multi-roll package of toilet paper.

‘MAKE LEMONADE FROM LEMONS’

Riedy said he thought initially that the pictures “might be my covid-19 version of the Dust Bowl portraits of the 1930s,” the faces etched with worry or despair. Instead, almost everyone is smiling.

Part of that might be habit — you see a camera pointed at you and you grin — but Riedy suspects something else is happening, too.

“Perhaps I’ll feel differently after weeks or months of this,” he wrote on his blog, “but for now, I’m optimistic that most of us will make lemonade from these lemons and become closer as families and communities.”