Event photographers have been shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic. Corporate, commercial and wedding photographers are all looking at their schedule in disbelief. Dazed and confused.
As of the beginning of February, with a steady ramp up to the first week of March, enquiries stopped and the phone ringing meant a cancellation. The events industry has now been completely erased for the next 2 months ( at least ). These weren’t just Peterborough photographer based jobs. The majority were in London with a few dotted around the rest of the country. After a couple of calls I tried to convince myself this was pure coincidence and the large corporate clients were spooked unnecessarily. It must be that they were proactively managing a potential PR nightmare should anything vaguely serious come our way? Seems plausible… I told myself. We had already watched the state of Wuhan on the news so many times, the UK was possibly a little “media numb” to the prospect of the virus and it’s effects spreading to our shores. In simple terms, Wuhan is a long way away. Humans are consistently bad at appreciating threat when it’s the other side of the planet. The phone calls kept coming and before long I realised that every single corporate shoot was now ghosted. A full spring/summer of event photography was now empty. Then, as if by magic, the commercial shoots went too. The positive side to this is the work is still there waiting for me, but it’s all pushed at least 6 months into the future with re-bookings when we come out the other end of this strange and dystopian present we have all been sucked into. Not the kind of time travel I’d ever thought I’d be part of and to be honest, feels more like a missing 2020 episode of Black Mirror than reality.
Any large scale corporate or commercial event involves a ton of planning, coordination, staffing, experience and teamwork. It does seem logical that if there’s a societal bump in the road coming, you would want to regroup to a point in the calendar that is way beyond it, when hopefully, things have returned to normal-ish. Rescheduling a large event once is a big enough pain in the rear, let alone having to do it twice so I totally get the timescale and reasoning. All the people in the events business are facing similar if not identical employment issues right now. And by “employment” issues, I mean “feed my family and pay the mortgage” issues. Everyone from project managers, drivers, warehouse staff, lighting engineers, camera ops, powerpoint designers, cable bashers, local crew, IT admins, venue security and catering have all had the rug pulled out from under them until who knows when. Lots of other industries have too but this is the one I have been a part of for a decade, a constant for 10 years that has all but vanished. This storyline is more classic black and white Twilight Zone than Black Mirror.
Now the dust is settling, Boris has spoken and the new rules of social distancing are becoming standard behaviour it’s time to look for the positives. I refuse to twiddle my thumbs indefinitely. There are a few things that I’ve not even had a spare hour to deal with for longer than I can remember. These no longer need to be pushed down to the bottom of the “to do” pile. Technically, there isn’t even a “to do” pile for the foreseeable. As a creative, productivity and creative output is key. What better time to experiment and keep momentum by getting stuck into something that would never otherwise get accomplished in a working week. By the end of this hiatus I will have taken some beautiful portraits of my own children and mastered the Mavic Pro that has sat in the office since October of last year. Just because the industry has stopped for a while doesn’t mean I have to. The next news post I add may very well be a finished run of product photography that will now get finished ahead of schedule.
It is important for me to clarify this is not a company announcement for sympathy, handouts or shoulders to cry on. To be clear – I am not writing this to try and convince you that I have it harder than anyone else. To the contrary, I am 100% aware that some people will have to deal with absolute consequences of either losing their own life or losing a loved one because of the virus. No, I wanted to write something, just something to document this bizarre epoch we find ourselves in as an industry person, a photographer and more specifically, an event photographer. I want to look back at this post in a year or two and be able to remind myself of how strange 2020 was – and that we got past it.