In March, I went to Finland as part of the photographic collective MAP6. Suddenly, the COVID-19 situation worsened and we found ourselves trapped in a country with locked borders...
''On March 16th, five members of the MAP6 collective flew to Finland to photograph the area around Rovaniemi in Lapland. The coronavirus was beginning to take hold across the world; it had been ranked as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11th, and its impact was only just beginning to be realised. Within hours of arriving they were notified that all return flights had been cancelled. With the country entering a state of emergency and the borders closed, the MAP6 members were potentially stranded. Events escalated as they watched alarming news updates from their apartment. Museums and schools had closed in Rovaniemi, and restaurants and bars were shutting. This was the beginning of a global lockdown. For four days the MAP6 photographers documented the crisis from within Finland, whilst awaiting confirmation of a flight home. The text is from headlines that appeared on various social media channels during that time.''
The curated MAP6 group project is on the MAP6 website.
All of my images for this project are on my website: see MAP6: The Isolation Project.
