LOCKDOWN
Roy Mehta's arresting images of the natural world are a visceral response to the strange days of the early pandemic, when an unusually beautiful spring contrasted with media coverage of an impending catastrophe - giving rise to a peculiar tension between stillness and chaos. Propelled by an urge to capture this feeling, Mehta turned to the natural landscape to ease his sense of discomfort with the future.
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'I love the slowness of the garden, of growing my own food,' he wrote at the time. 'Like so many of us I have noticed a real change in the quality of the air, a lack of traffic noise, a greater awareness of birdsong and the sensation of time itself being slower.' Inspired by literature, poetry and other readings that poeticise our relationship with the natural world, Mehta's nearly spiritual photographs draw on twilight as a metaphor for transition and mirror his search for inner peace during an unsettling time. To Mehta, really looking at nature (as many of us perhaps only did for the first time during lockdown) means being witness to everyday unfolding dramas in an endless cycle of decay and renewal. In this simultaneous appreciation of beauty and loss, of seeing ourselves as part of the bigger picture, these photographs not only offer a bittersweet reflection on the experience of the pandemic, but also a political commentary on the collective (mis)use of our natural environment that has led to this point of global devastation.
©Jilke Golbach, from London in Lockdown published by Hoxton Mini Press, 2021
