More Lonely Ere: Idiorrhythmic communities and the nostalgic lens

Abstract

This article discusses the photographic project, ‘More Lonely Ere’, made during the COVID-19 pandemic focusing on the community of Watford, Hertfordshire, where the author was based and unable to leave. Watford will be compared to Marion Shoard’s ‘edgelands’ and the concept of rurality will be used to situate Watford as a liminal space between city and countryside but also to demonstrate the limited locality and community during COVID-19. The article also considers Roland Barthes’ ‘Idiorrhythm’ describing how people share spaces but live according to individual daily rhythms. This connects ideas of community during a pandemic when people are expected to maintain separation from each other. The resulting photographs will be analysed in terms of a conscious ‘documentary aesthetic’ and photographic nostalgia, materiality and abstraction will be discussed. Comparisons are made to canonical works and also Robert Frost’s ‘Desert Places’ poem to provide useful metaphor and a framework for photographic work.