Beth Galton – COVID Diary – PhotoBook Journal

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

It is amazing how fast we have put COVID behind us. It seems like light-years ago today, but we were still emerging from it only three years ago in July of 2022, the date of the last entry in Beth Galton’s photobook COVID Diary. COVID changed everything, but you can argue that it also changed nothing – nothing for the better, at least, given the unfortunate polarization of our response.

COVID Diary is an engaging written chronicle interspersed with photo still lifes that photographer Beth Galton created as a means to process the stressful, traumatic experience of lockdown and isolation. The texts take you back in time and give you a blow-by-blow narration of two-plus years of key events. Photos from various media – cellphone, computer, and TV screenshots, plus official maps and statistics – are combined with selfies, family snapshots, and window and street views and are seamlessly woven around Galton’s texts. Galton connects her lived experience to the larger context and examines developments as they unfold, taking the viewer along for the ride, and her comments on particular details of everyday life provide a vivid reminder of the situation at the time.

At five points in the book we are treated to an almost musical counterpoint, several page spreads of COVID-themed photographic constructions that contain references to nature as well as COVID. They are rendered in rich, saturated colors and most are slightly blurred, as if to suggest instability, motion, or emotion. Like a recurring theme song in a movie, after you leave them behind they resonate as you continue reading: not just a clever juxtaposition, but an effective one as well.

The editing, layout, and pacing of COVID Diary are inventive and varied and sustain the viewer’s interest without becoming predictable or repetitive. There is a certain dissonance in the seductive, luxe presentation of the book as object and the raw, fraught subject, however, and you can imagine that the book would be a completely different experience, harsher and louder, if it were packaged as a zine.

A satisfyingly detailed record of a historical moment as well as an example of the enduring power of the individual documentary narrative, COVID Diary demonstrates what photographs and texts, artfully combined, can do.

Hans Hickerson, Co-Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

____________

Beth Galton – COVID Diary

Photographer: Beth Galton (lives in New York)

Text: Joan Duncan Oliver, Amy Bonnaffons, Beth Galton

Language: English

Design: Sally Herman

Photo Editors: Beth Galton, William Boling

Copy Editor: Hillary Brown

Hardbound with sewn Swiss binding; 109 color photographs; ISBN 979-8-9876258-9-7; 124 pages; 9 X 12 in.

____________

Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.