Tomorrow marks the 5 year anniversary of Annie Blake’s death.
We made these photographs in April 2020 as a new stage of my At a Distance project. We called it Emergence. Portraits about the insulation/isolation of distance, about how we, the world, women, and individuals were being rebuilt and remade in those early months of 2020: about what was possible- how we were drawn and fervent as more us, how we knew something we hadn’t known before.
We kept our distance, sometimes shouting through windows other times using the phone to communicate.
I used rocks and ladders and zoom to get as close as I could, the sound of my lens tapping on the glass.
We didn't know this would be the last time we saw each other or that these would be the last photos we took. A few months later she’d muse about what it would mean to be, or not to be, a ghost and then she’d become one.
In hindsight the impending is there, but portraits document life. Created by the insistence that belongs to the living only, despite the boundaries of glass and space, disease and distance.
RIP Annie. Forever in many directions.
