Lockdown2020

This photograph was taken in the garden of the Château de Breteuil in the autumn of 2020, during one of my first trips into nature after the lockdown began. It depicts a Danish white red deer that, encircled by tall stone walls, spends its life in the château’s moat as a luxurious ornament of the estate.

When I saw the deer in the deep moat, standing beside the wall that separates it from the forest and the vast expanse of nature to which it belongs, I felt the same anxiety that overtook humanity during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Since then, our life situation has changed; the deer’s has not.

The photograph is framed in lead, suggesting the coldness of a prison cell. Its small format calls for an intimate gaze, empathy, and response-ability.