2020
I am at a point now where I really don’t have words to accurately describe 2020 anymore.
It started well even though my father died the first week of January. He was 93, had a lived a full life and I was glad he was free from his tired body. In January I attended the “Legacies of LIGHT” symposium at CCP and lots of great things were happening with my photography.
I flew to Boston on March 8th to watch my son’s hockey playoffs and ride back home with him when the season was over. I saw two games and then there was news of the first COVID-19 cases in Boston. The next day at dinner in the North End it was empty. By the end of the week his season had been canceled and we started driving home to California.
I had already planned to photograph on the road trip back but realizing we would be witnessing such an historic time I tried to document everything I possibly could. We spent two nights in Chicago to see my daughter and they closed the restaurants the day we left. We basically were trying to outrun the shutdown to get home. Seeing things like a vacant Las Vegas was so surreal.
Once I was back in Southern California I continued to photograph as much as I could, often photographing from the passenger seat while my son drove so I didn’t have to walk among what few people were on the street. I tried to capture as much of the change as I could. I also photographed in a different style than I normally do because the subject matter changed so drastically.
In May as people began to question the lockdown I photographed the Gavin Newsom protest in Huntington Beach, then the Trump Rally in Newport Harbor on Memorial Day. At the time I had no idea the images I would be taking a week later would be such a contrast. I made a point to spend several days photographing the George Floyd protests in as many different parts of Southern California as I could.
This body of work is a documentation of our current uncertain time.
William Karl Valentine