Seascapes, such as those from Hiroshi Sugimoto, have always fascinated me. However, with a lockdown in place, it was impossible to travel to the sea from Switzerland. I had to find another way to to shoot them. That way turned out to be public webcams, running live on my TV.
I live alone in Geneva and I found the lockdown to be very trying indeed. I could not visit my son, who lives in another city, nor was I able to visit friends or family. But, of course, the same was happening worldwide as we shifted a more of our lives online. It is, therefore, rather apt that I ended up using online virtual windows to document the pandemic.
During the lockdown, I turned to these public webcams that stream on the Internet to substitute for my physical presence at their locations. With the live streams playing on TV, I shot photographs of the screen at key moments to construct stories of emptiness, the desertion of urban spaces, and the natural sights we did not see.
Even though the project is mainly composed of urban scenes, I included webcams out in nature, knowing that most of us did not witness nature's beauty during lockdown.
This series of seascapes are from that project.
