Noëlle de Haan – A Quarantined House
Dear grandchildren,
On the third day of April 2020, I started shuffling through my house at 3pm, taking pictures of the scenes I found around me, some flat mates, their rooms and our windows. All of us were in our mid-twenties and carried a thesis-induced stress that was paired with a peak of a global epidemic called Covid-19. This virus was experiencing its first peak, causing humans around the world to stay quarantined at home. Simple things, like the sound of someone walking with shoes on in the house, had become slightly uncommon. The playground in front of our house had been closed down by fences and it was quiet outside. The atmosphere was especially eerie this day as the light through grey clouds hit our concrete walls, which turned out rather evident on this roll of Ilford HP5+ (400 iso) that I snook into my analogue Canon AE-1 Program camera, waking it from its long epidemic-nap. After I filled this roll of black and white film with images, it became my first roll to be home-developed. For me personally, that was quite a milestone. Until 9pm that evening, I entertained myself with chemicals, developing and scanning these pictures. My clumsy process shows in the inconsistent grey-tones, scratches and occasional remains of water-drops and dust that I failed to notice. They, however, ended up adding an extra layer of mess to these honest snapshots that documented our feelings that day.
Noëlle de Haan is an art-historian, who likes to merge the notions of daily-life and extraordinary moments through the practice of analogue photography. She creates photo-albums, following a tradition of her grandfather, and occasionally shows snippets of her archive to the public eye.